Chime Sharp

Chime Sharp. Before it there was just Chime. Like a note on a piano.

Chime Sharp is easy, it’s a block-fitting puzzle game set to music. You’re tasked with making quadrilaterals to cover as much as the play surface as possible before the time runs out, music slowly building up. Easy.

You know when you’re playing Civilisation and last time you didn’t do as well as you thought you could have done because your civilisation became too focused on the capital? And how you wished you’d shared the wealth between numerous cities, giving you more chance of combating threats that directly targeted that city? And how you are acutely aware that in a videogame you’ve just created a pretend version of the north/south divide? So you expand more quickly the next time and then everyone gets killed by barbarians and it makes you wonder if every parallel universe where the UK succeeds as a nation Barnsley still gets shat upon?

Chime Sharp is a bit like that.

Working only one quad at a time prevents you from having as many options available for where to place shapes to coherently add to what you’re working on. So you start a few bits intending to work on them all at once, lose focus and inevitably barbarians metaphorically conquer Barnsley. Again.

You know when you’re playing Tetris, and you’ve got to precisely fit the pieces together so that your game doesn’t end all-but immediately? The same goes for any of the games broadly similar.

Chime Sharp isn’t much like that.

Sometimes it is. In Sharp mode you do spend a lot of time cramming things together, but even then there’s always a bigger picture. Writing about Meteos, a complicated metaphor was created comparing Tetris to a burger, Puyo Puyo to a cheeseburger and such. Chime Sharp is, to further expand that flawless metaphor further, a hot dog. From some angles it definitely looks like it’s a burger, but it’s not really. Death in Chime Sharp rarely comes from a mistake rapidly spiralling out of control as it does in Tetris and Co., but a series of smaller inefficiencies. Time spent deciding where to put pieces, time spent creating a new shape that didn’t help increase coverage. Likely when time runs out you’ll be doing quite well.

You know in Doom (2016) when you’ve died once or twice and learned about the area you’re trapped in? You’ve learned the defensible positions, where pick-ups are to be found and so whilst punching nearby demons firmly in the cock you’re slowly working your position towards the places you worked out last time?

Chime Sharp is a bit like that.

No power-ups, even fewer demons that require their cocks punching, but handling your current situation whilst keeping an eye on how you’re going to get to another area is a very significant aspect. You might hop there directly, but more likely you’ll work there in a wandering, indirect path, handling situations that arise along the way.

You know how in Lumines, there’s the bar that moves across and everything you do is in reference to that bar? There’s one of those in Chime Sharp too. And yet…

Chime Sharp isn’t that much like that.

It feels like it should be, definitely. But short term you should be much more concerned about the bars passing down the quads you’ve created, aggressively trying to make them as large as possible in the limited time. Spinning and spinning pieces until you finally give in and plonk them down.

Like Hitman, basically. If you could freeze the action and you could come up with a perfect plan, but in reality you mess up one placement and no longer are you the silent assassin, but instead you’ve massacred hundreds. And/or run out of time.

Ultimately, this is a difficult game. Possibly just a game I’m not very good at, and I am hopeless, but in all ways it feels difficult but unnecessarily so. This isn’t Dark Souls. There’s enough overall challenge for the second-by-second minutiae to be made easier, an undo button for when you accidentally place pieces in the wrong place, maybe the modern Tetris option that allow you to save a piece for later. Etcetera. Perhaps not in every mode, but learning to play Civilisation, Doom and Hitman all at once is a bit of a challenge.

Instead, the short term time limits and the overall time limit in combination with some of the music gives the game a feeling of being claustrophobic and discouraging which just doesn’t suit it. There’s no doubt this is a very good game and the times when it clicks are satisfying, but they’re just not common enough if you’re rubbish.

Pat Sharp. Before him, there was just Pat.

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Originally published at BlueKeycard.