Hello-Fi Rush has a superpower: it teleports me again to my elementary and highschool years. Again then there was nothing as particular as a Saturday morning. Not solely did I not have faculty, however I might tune into my favourite cartoons and watch one thing fantastic.
Whether or not it was Goku lastly defeating Frieza after 20 episodes, Dexter inadvertently unleashing the most recent horror on the town in Dexter’s Laboratory, or Ash shedding one other Pokémon Championship, there was a sure boundless vitality in Saturday morning cartoons. A spirit of journey and innocence that also crucially captured overarching themes, comparable to Hey Arnold’s commentary on poverty.
It is grow to be extraordinarily tough to recapture the spirit of the animated weekend reveals of the ’80s and ’90s. Nevertheless it’s more and more wanting like video video games are the place to do it, and Hello-Fi Rush is the mannequin.
Rock it for them
Launched in 2023 on Xbox Sequence
Developer Tango Gameworks delivers a fast-paced motion sport peppered with a way of fantasy, electrical vitality, and a breakneck tempo that faucets into a lot of what made these earlier cartoons particular. However extra importantly, it is usually full of broader messages and commentary about rampant corporatization and the dehumanization of staff. And the brilliance of Hello-Fi Rush is the way it manages to effortlessly weave all of this collectively, whereas additionally offering stellar motion gameplay.
In Hello-Fi Rush you play as Chai, a younger man who desires of being a rock star, with all the celebrity that entails. Chai indicators up for experimental limb substitute surgical procedure at Vandelay Applied sciences, however when the surgical procedure goes fallacious, he inadvertently finally ends up with an MP3 participant embedded in his chest and the power to see the world by synesthesia (actually, the power to really feel music and rhythm, and see it on this planet).
All that setup is what enhances the character of Hello-Fi Rush, because the world itself vibrates to the rhythm of the music: an eclectic mixture of rock and pop that features songs by The Black Keys, 9 Inch Nails, The Prodigy and extra.
Apparently, there’s even a copyright-safe streaming mode the place all licensed songs are changed with authentic tracks by a “band” known as The Glass Pyramids (mainly the sport’s sound system).
Hello-Fi Rush is an expertise you may’t discover in every other sport. Every stage has platforming challenges and enemies to struggle, the place you utilize combo-based techniques like Satan Could Cry or God of Conflict, with the added incentive of timing your assaults to the rhythm to extend injury. However the different secret is that you do not really have to be good at rhythm video games to be good at Hello-Fi Rush, as the sport integrates a ton of choices that can assist you tailor your assaults to the rhythm, and even make fight satisfying when you do not.
The rhythm is yours ceaselessly.
It’s a sport that wishes you to not solely play it and have a superb time, however to really feel the music in your bones.
Hello-Fi Rush, greater than something, merely desires you to have enjoyable and takes liberal measures to attain that.
Its motion is tightly tuned to be accessible and deceptively deep, its story pacing oscillates between charming character moments and over-the-top motion, and its shadowy visuals handle to really feel stylistic and grounded in actuality. In some ways it is a sport about duality, even all the way down to its social commentary on the character of companies wanting down on the individuals who do many of the work. The credit even embody an authentic tune about how actually onerous it’s to make a online game and the way grateful the event workforce is to have performed Hello-Fi Rush.
This in itself reveals that music is the important thing to Hello-Fi Rush’s work. Not simply what you hear, however the very concept of how music unites us as human beings and expresses society, tradition and even enterprise – it is an efficient solution to grow to be fully absorbed into the world of Hello-Fi Rush. And it is becoming, as a result of what’s the very first thing you bear in mind about these Saturday morning cartoons all these years later? The musical themes.
By linking an motion sport with a rhythm expertise, Hello-Fi Rush takes you right into a zen mode the place there may be not a single thought in your thoughts apart from embracing the music and defeating these annoying robots.
However music can be about move, discovering the appropriate rhythm between intro, verse, refrain and outro, and Hello-Fi Rush is aware of this. That is why every stage has the theme of a tune itself, bombastic openings and endings, and in between, you leap forwards and backwards between intense sections of fight, methodical exploration, and key character improvement.
That is what makes Hello-Fi Rush one of many best-paced motion video games on the market. Tango Gameworks merely understood the duty and knew that to really embrace rhythm you needn’t solely good music, however a solution to seize the very feeling of that music.
And that is the type of distinctive concept that thrives in previous Saturday morning cartoons: one thing out of the extraordinary that simply goes together with it. Likewise, for this reason many of those packages have stood the take a look at of time. Captain Planet’s environmental message works so nicely as a result of it is rooted in each component. Pokémon thrived by emulating that concept of childhood journey, of being free from the bounds of maturity and experiencing the world with new eyes.
Hello-Fi Rush is the closest distillation of that concept in video video games, and it additionally occurs to be a fairly radical motion expertise. It’s a sport that wishes you to not solely play it and have a superb time, but in addition really feel the music in your bones. And possibly alongside the best way, you may consider as a result of Your foot is tapping.
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