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Old School Musical Review

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Old School Musical 
• Developer-La Moutarde
• Publisher-Dear Villagers
• Switch, PC

Old School Musical had me thinking a lot about what makes a rhythm game enjoyable to me. On the surface it seems like an easy slam dunk–take the aesthetics of old videogames, mash them together into a narrative and turn it into a musical you play along to. But the end result ends up a little incoherent. It draws on many sources for its homages, and does a reasonable job of replicating them, but it never finds a coherent direction, mixing aesthetics haphazardly, and scoring the scenes with tracker style music that brings to mind the European PC scene more than the console and arcade games it pays homage to. 

Most damning is the lack of audio and visual feedback in Old School Musical. Not every rhythm game can have each note sync to the backing track, but OSM lacks even the simple percussion most games use to accompany button presses, making it difficult to judge how close you’re getting to the beat. 

Without these audio cues, feedback is entirely visual, and OSM lacks flair or function here as well. Each note gives you a basic rating on your timing, with a small radial burst. It’s underwhelming, and makes it difficult to feel out the groove of the song. I found it at its worst when I had to play any hold note, since it lacks the pulsing effect that most games use to indicate that you’re continuing to hit the note, and it doesn’t darken missed notes either. This kind of feedback is essential as you play more complicated tracks, and helps you react to the music unconsciously. Without that feedback, I wasn’t always sure which instrument I was playing and or if my timing was correct. 

Unable to nail the rhythm game basics, OSM relies instead on the novelty of seeing its detailed pixel art homages to various retro games. Personally, this is my biggest sticking point, beyond even the flimsy rhythm game elements. OSM is at once not specific enough, nor broad enough to work as a proper homage to the titles it references. 

There’s something off about seeing Metal Gear mashed up with Windows 95 style error messages, or Outrun removed of its summer road trip soundtrack. Seeing such specific visual references to each game, divorce of their iconic sounds and music only highlights how surface level the homages are. OSM can imitate the look of old titles, but it doesn’t recognize what their appeal is.