Beat of Life Is Dead on Arrival

Welcome back my weebs and otakus, it's Otakunofuji with another game video. Today I want to briefly talk about Beat of Life - a quirky new rhythm game for all platforms. The objective is to keep a woman alive by making her internal organs function to the beat of the music. It's very charming and has nice art and a cute premise, but is it fun? No. No it is absolutely not. Stay tuned for why.

Do you ever watch a trailer for a game and go "Huh, I really don't think that's going to be very fun." and then the game comes out and you were right? Well, that was my exact experience with Beat of Life. I was drawn in by the art and the quirky premise and I'm a big fan of publisher Happy Player, but I could instantly tell it wasn't going to be any good to actually play. I bought it anyway, of course, because I'm stupid I guess. 

What's wrong with it? Well, it's way, way, way too darned hard. You're controlling this woman's internal organs, remember, so you have to make her breathe and make her liver work and her stomach digest and even blink her eyes, among other things, and there's just way too much to keep track of. The button you're supposed to push lights up on the bottom of the screen, but it's just way too much. And sometimes they expect you to press two or three buttons together but they're ones that are practically impossible to press at the same time unless you have 5 thumbs. It's like the developer forgot basic human anatomy or something. Even on "Easy" difficulty the game totally overwhelms you by the second level. 

So it's too hard, and because it's too hard, you can't even watch the top part of the screen showing the cute girl whose organs you're in control of slowly dying as you repeatedly fail to make her breathe and blink her eyes and make her heart beat until she sneezes and burps and farts all at the same time and explodes. It makes the whole medical premise feel totally arbitrary because you can't actually pay attention to anything but the button prompts. 

Beat of Life just isn't very good. The art is cool. The chiptune soundtrack is OK. But it's an impossible pain in the ass to actually play. It seems a lot of the coverage is giving the game a free pass because it's an artsy fartsy emotional experience or whatever from a solo female developer, but I call it like I see it. Beat of Life totally, absolutely, completely sucks. At least it's only $10, but I absolutely would not recommend it.