Wandersong
Review

Wandersong (2018) is an adventure where you play a bard on a quest to gather parts of a song. Uniquely, you interact with the environment and inhabitants by singing with one of the direction sticks. It stands out not only for its start of love and loss but for how you essentially play a walking musical instrument that makes sounds to solve puzzles.

You travel the world with a witch named Miriam and help the friends you make at each new location. It plays like a side-on running and jumping game but you use your musical abilities to solve puzzles. It sounds complex but is actually really simple, you just move your stick to the different coloured portions of the song wheel for each of the notes in an octave. As you sing the world around you responds and events to occur in the environment.

As you progress you learn not only to make music but to match the tunes you hear around you. Like a rhythm game, this offers new ways to solve puzzles and move through the world. In this way, you steadily gather all the pieces of the Earthsong that enables the universe to be saved.

The result is a novel game match by a lively world full of interesting people to meet: townsfolk, grandparents, lumberjacks, doctors and your reluctant, grumpy witch companion, Miriam. It all works together to build playful relationships with a surprisingly deep story. It's a game about community relationships rather than one heroic individual.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Wandersong 3 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 3 weeks ago.