Quick Look: AVSEQ

AVSEQ is a video game about making music and my sneaky suspicion is that it is, at least in part, the product of an aspiring musician because the entire experience can easily be perceived as a gaming representation of what it actually takes to create a piece of serious music.

The basic mechanics are pretty simple: discrete bits of color drop from the ceiling of a stage and the gamer needs to link them together, taking into account their color, creating chains that he can then detonate in order to collect the bits (the game calls them “atoms” but that seems somehow wrong).

Different colors can only be linked via white droplets and the static fragments also appear, allowing the player to create a sound and link a note.

A number of collected notes are required to pass a stage and some of the white pieces have special effects, like slowing down time.

AVSEQ also throw a time limit into the mix and the resulting game is quite hard at time, exemplified by the fact that it took no less than three tries to get past the second stage of the game (the trick seems to be to never ever let one atom of information hit the bottom of the screen).

The entire design is deceptively simple, but there’s real beauty in solving the challenges that the game throws at you and a feeling of real sadness implied in failing to reach the goal of the stage by just one note.

AVSEQ manages to rise above the simple concepts of matching colors and special powers to get through stages because it allows the player to create music via his in-game actions and some of the resulting pieces are really interesting, if not particularly easy to listen to.