Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Jul 28, 2022

  Sonority is a beautiful, but emotional game about the restorative healing power of music. In this game, you play Esther, a young girl carrying a panflute looking for a cure for a sick friend. She comes across a world that has fallen silent and the power of her music resounds throughout the land and brings life back to the singing stones. The hills are alive with the sound of music! (I couldn't resist that!) This is a game that will resonate with music lovers, but you don't need to know music to play it. I have no musical knowledge; I am hopeless at mathematics; I am also tone deaf and hearing impaired to boot! But I managed to 100% the game. Just like the heroine I had to persevere and use the guides now and again. Game play entails guessing what notes to enter into the note receptors, in ascending or descending order to activate either steps, blocks or lifts to go up or down or even to rotate. Keyboard players have the notes on the bottom of the screen. It is just a process of elimination for non music people. It goes from simple note sequences which develop into small melodies and then into complex pieces of music as the game progresses. This game is very puzzle heavy...over 60+ puzzles to solve and I did find it dragged towards the end. The difficulty ratcheted up considerably when you have to move the note receptors to the right spacing. There are also some time based puzzles which require quite a bit of platforming and dexterity in navigation to reach the end in time. This is where the game lost its relaxing feel as these were quite challenging for slowpokes like me. One puzzle took me about 50 tries before I succeeded...only to have a similar puzzle on its heels. There are music symbols to collect all over the place. You don't know how many you have collected until you leave a particular environment. Some of these symbols are difficult to find. You also discover 3 other instruments other than your trusty panflute. Graphics were beautiful and you can see that the world was lovingly crafted with attention to detail. The colour palette was delightful and the animal characters were very well characterised. The voice overs were excellent and believable. The soundtrack for this game is just divine and there is singing in both English and German. The harmonies between the singing stones and preceptors were hauntingly beautiful. I advise you to go back to the Valley of Stones after you've finished the game and just stand there and listen to the melodies. There is a map but you can't interact with it. There are no chapter selects at the end of the game. You just have to work out the shortest way from place to place, if you need to go back and find missing music symbols. Apart from the map, the other negatives were too many puzzles and the story could have been fleshed out more. But these are just minor quibbles. Highly recommended for music lovers. It is exciting to see such innovation from indie developers! 8/10
• gamedeal user

  Jul 29, 2022

  Ultimately, I VERY much enjoyed this game. The puzzles are difficult but not TOO difficult, the characters, while not particularly engaging, are voiced well. However, sadly, I am unable to recommend this game to others because of several bugs, one of them game-breaking. I had to constantly quit to the main menu and restart due to getting stuck within the graphics and unable to move (happened at least half a dozen times in my one short session). And just before the end, there is a part where you have to run to complete something in time to progress, but it is on a diagonal where the hit box is so impossibly angled/sized that I literally spent the last 45 minutes of my recorded game-play trying to get past, getting stuck and restarting, and could not do it, and I no longer want to try.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 19, 2022

  I'm asking for a refund on this. The character's movespeed is slow, and taking the time to run around each area to search behind trees and rocks for collectibles isn't my idea of fun. The puzzles were very straightforward and rather tedious. I expected more music and less plodding.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 5, 2022

  I really enjoyed the relaxed gameplay and the innovation using the music scale. I quit when the timing of sequences overwhelmed my WASD coordination. According to a walkthrough video, that's about 3/4 the way through the game. So it's not a shooter, or even an adventure game ala Tomb Raider, but you better be damned accurate on the keys.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 25, 2023

  I felt kinda mislead by the trailer for this one. While everything on the surface claims it's this big musical puzzle game the actual puzzles are purely mathematical in nature. The music is just a theme and all of the puzzles involve figuring out how many notes up or down from a given note you need to be. It actually allows you to just swap the letters for numbers. They're going for a very cute and child friendly vibe in the story, the environment has a miniature diorama feel, and the puzzles themselves are fine if you enjoy the same logic repeated to exhaustion. Might have been more fun if I went in with the right expectations but even then the repetition of the same puzzle with different iterations felt tired by the time I reached the end of the first area.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 2, 2022

  Sonority is a fun, original puzzle game which would have benefit from some more careful programming, there's many little things which are not disruptive, usually, but they can get annoying all together. Pros: - original music based puzzles revolving around the idea of modifying the environment through music sequences. Don't worry, you need more maths and eye than ear. - puzzle mechanics are kept fresh by the introduction of some twists here and there and by how music causes different effects on different artifacts - the world is pleasant to wander through - the story is a bit unclear, but interesting enough and mostly fitting the whole musical theme Cons: - many collectibles are just hidden in blind spots of the map, forcing you to run along the perimeter of the areas looking for them... some are also hidden behind / under moving ruins , which is not entirely fair. - if you hide collectibles in hard-to-find spots, then make sure the character doesn't get stuck in graphics / environment; also, invisible walls are meh, just put a plain wall instead. - animations' triggers should be rethought to not be triggered every time the character is near them. - sometimes it is quite hard to study how to engage a puzzle, even by moving the camera with the mouse (which is too restrained and usually ends up being useless). All in all, I enjoyed the game and its ideas and I recommend it for sure. I just hope the developers take a bit of time to give it a good round of polishing and improvement!
• gamedeal user

  Oct 15, 2022

  Got to the water temple and realized how bored I was of the same puzzle over and over again.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 11, 2022

  Hey ho, fellow travelling musicians! This game will bring you to an another angle of music perception. The whole new puzzle mechanic is based on descending and ascending note sequences that will move any objects that can 'hear'. Here, in Rockery, even the stones can listen to your music. Play in tune with surrounding nature and other things and find the healing melody for your lovely friend — wise talking bear who was told you countless tales but got ill (one of the most cute motives for an adventure I have ever saw in games, to be honest). That's it! Pretty simple yet deligtful puzzle game. Nice visuals and interesting mechanic. And of course Music. I really recommend it. Enjoyed without any pause from start till the end. ___________________ Now for the sad part. I collected really a bunch of questions to devs but couldn't find any feedback form. It is about bugs and issues, most of which can be fixed really quick. It would be good if u contact me so I write it to you directly and not here.
• gamedeal user

  May 26, 2022

  Brilliant small music game that brings lots of cool concepts together without making it too complicated. Plenty of areas to come back to later on in the game, very impressive for an indie game
• alleyne

  Sep 24, 2023

  Very cute game with musical interval puzzles. It's helping to support my music theory knowledge. Some of the collectables are really challenging to find. So far so good - bug-free and runs well.