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Melatonin is a really well done and fun rhythm game with a dream thematic. Don’t be fooled by its cozy artstyle and catchy beats though: some stages can be pretty hard!
Have you ever played Rhythm Heaven? I haven’t, so you won’t hear too many comparisons to it here, but if you do know the game then I suppose it’s my obligation to tell you that lots of people are saying Melatonin is a great Rhythm Heaven-like game. But what does that mean, exactly? Well, read on and you’ll find out!
In Melatonin, you play through the unnamed main character’s dreams. Most of the gameplay is divided into 4 nights. Each night is divided into 4 levels that can be accessed via a mini overworld of sorts, and a 5th level that combines all 4 prior and switches between their gameplay. Speaking of gameplay, it has the basic types of commands one would expect from a rhythm game. You have three buttons you can press: left, right and center (which is the one you’ll be using the most). Sometimes you’ll be prompted to press left/right together, or long press any combination of those three. That’s it.
At the end of each level, you get a star rating out of 3 maximum, if playing through normal mode, called score mode, and a ring rating out of 3 maximum if playing through hard mode. You need to accumulate 8 stars to unlock the 5th level each night, and the rings are just for bragging rights. Inside the level itself, you have your typical miss, early, perfect and late ratings for each note. If you hit a note in time with the beat/visual cue, you get the perfect rating, which awards you the most points. Late/early award you less points, and missing actually LOSES you points.
Each level can be played in four modes: tutorial, score, hard and editor. Score is your standard game mode, and hard is pretty much the same stage/melody as score, but harder and with variations in the patterns. These are the gamemodes that award you the star/ring rewards, and in fact, you need two stars in any given level to unlock its hard mode. Tutorial is basically what you would expect: it teaches you how to play the level. See, each level boils down to a rhythm game, sure, but they have different melodies and patterns coming at you, and the tutorial aims to teach exactly that. The game does a really good job at tutoring its player, which is great because… the game is pretty hard.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902723871
On the standard accessibility settings, once you play on the “real” gameplay modes, which are score and hard, you don’t really get help. You don’t get an indicator on your screen telling you to press A at the right moment, no no no. You HAVE to recognize audiovisual cues and react to them at the right time, which is precisely why the tutorial is so important. And at the same time, it’s also why the game can be so hard. You can easily see examples of this in what are likely to be your very first levels played: dream about food and dream about shopping.
In dream about food, you have boxes of different types of food throwing, well, food at you. They have three attack patterns, all of which are, in fact, timed with different beats of the song, but you can also just as easily click A when you see the food pretty much on top of your character. That’s how I got through both score and hard mode with pretty good ratings.
In dreams about shopping, however, you have objects falling in a specific order with specific timing between each object. Once the full collection has fallen, you have to then swipe your credit card following the same timing in which they fell. Unlike the food dream, that shows the food reaching the character, here you have to rely on your feeling and on the beat of the song. This made things a lot harder for me.
Some levels also have obstacles such as clouds that show up and cover part of the screen or visual cues that randomly leave the screen for a while, which makes things even harder depending on the level. I fully acknowledge that this is a me issue, so I’m not complaining. I’m just saying all this to illustrate that each level is quite different from the one before and after it, and unlike other rhythm games like yakuza karaoke, you can’t rely on getting prompted to press a button around the time you need to.
If the game is too hard for you, you CAN go to the menu and turn on assists. There are 5 different assists. All of them can be individually turned on and off, allowing you to fully customize your difficulty. The options are: visual assist with the timing circle, audio assist with a metronome, increasing the window of time you can hit the button to get a perfect, less penalty for early/late hits and controller rumble, on by default. There’s honestly no shame in turning any of these on: at the end of the day, what matters is that you, as the player, enjoy yourself, especially with a game that looks and sounds this cozy.
Melatonin was hand-drawn, and the result is absolutely incredible and fully fits the dream aesthetic they were going for. The game looks amazing, and I can not stress this enough. But even better than its looks is its soundtrack, which is a relief given that this is a rhythm game. The tracks are vibrant, and they mostly work really well with the levels. I won’t lie that there were a few moments in which I felt like beats didn’t align with when I had to press the buttons, but I’m pretty sure that’s on me and my apparent inability to properly perceive sounds sometimes. Seriously though, words do this soundtrack no justice, so go watch the trailer!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2902723888
You might notice that so far, I haven’t spoken on the game’s storyline, and that’s because… it’s not really a focus in Melatonin. You can infer a lot about the main character via his dreams and the little cutscenes you get between nights of him and his room, but that’s about it. While it IS really cool to learn about him via his worries and desires and the environmental storytelling of his room, the fact is that the story is mostly there to introduce the gameplay, which is absolutely the focus here.
As for issues, I didn’t really run into any on the technical side of things. I did, however, feel a bit of a disconnect between the mood of the game and its difficulty. I was absolutely expecting a comfy and cozy experience by the beats and the visuals, but instead I was massacred by a lot of the levels. This isn’t an issue, mind you, as you can adjust difficulty via the accessibility options I mentioned, but it was still quite a shock for me. And if you have epilepsy, beware, as the game does contain flashing lights and an epilepsy warning.
The level editor, which is the fourth option you get when accessing any level, also leaves a lot to be desired. There’s no effective tutorial for it, it doesn’t allow you to switch songs, you can only use the set pieces and obstacles that are within that specific level, and you can’t even export your levels. There is a chance they will update the editor to make it more universal, though, so check back in a few weeks!
All things considered, Melatonin gets my recommendation to any rhythm game fan. It’s a joy to play through, provided the difficulty doesn’t frustrate you and you’re not too proud to turn on the accessibility options. If you’re curious about the length, the game took me about 3 hours to beat to the end of the “story”. I did not get 3 stars/rings on every level, and I turned on the help for some levels. If you do end up getting the game, let me know how you like it!
This review is also available in a video format! Click below to check it out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK6gihBat0s