I love the indie scene. I really do. There will always be a place in every gamer's living room for the AAA classics like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and The Last of Us, but there's something special about the smaller games crafted with originality and more love by a minute team of tightly knit friends that just can't be beaten. One of my favorite games of 2013 to date was Guacamelee!, a Metroid-Vania platformer where you play a luchadore protagonist fighting death himself in Mexico. Weird? Yes, it definitely is weird, but that didn't stop it from being fun and incredibly well designed, and I can say the same thing about Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians; weird, but so well designed and fun that it's hard not to like despite the flaws. If nothing else, I guarantee you'll find yourself tapping your toes to the beat - you'll have to if you want to save music itself!

In Beatbuddy, you play as the titular character Beatbuddy, an ethereal blob and brother to twin elements Harmony and Melody. Along with his buddy Clef (a bumbling engineer who offers the use of his faulty and unreliable bubblebuggy to traverse the world of Symphonia), you quest to stop the evil Prince Maestro from taking control of the music. Everything in Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians revolves around music - absolutely everything - and that's its primary hook. There have been other games like Rayman Origins that have levels that revolve around traversing a level that uses music to time your attacks and jumps, but Beatbuddy takes it a step further and models the entire game around that mechanic, and it's groovy as can be. I don't even like the genre of music that most of the songs fall under, and I'm particularly adverse to the idea of a song playing on a loop for 40+ minutes, but I still found myself grooving along with the soundtrack, unable to get the beat out of my skull.

It's not just enough to have the music playing in the background, giving you a subtle hint as to how you are to traverse obstacles or avoid enemies, the music is the level. This is symphonia, after all. Each of the six worlds is its own song, and the different elements and instruments fade in and out depending on what enemies and obstacles are nearby. For example, there are bass drum sponges that pulsate to the beat, and getting too close to them will propel you across the screen into walls or reflectors. If there are none of those nearby, then the bass drum part of the track goes silent, or if you activate one by getting too close and getting knocked across the screen, then the beat is particularly loud and powerful. There are crabs that tap on the snare and there are shellfish that shoot out little energy balls that sound strikingly like plucking a string on a guitar. All of these elements and enemies (and more) come together to form a cohesive song that loops until the stage is completed, and even though it can get a little repetitive, it's toe-tappingly fun throughout.

But timing isn't the only gameplay element crucial to Beatbuddy. There are many puzzle elements scattered throughout as well. Most of the puzzles are pretty simple, however, and tend to revolve around the idea that you'll be using the bass drum sponge as a way to knock yourself into destructible walls, angling surfaces to aim you in the right direction. There are also key-slot puzzles and on-off switch puzzles, but they're simplistic and made to support the key musical points. There is a vehicle called the bubblebuggy that your buddy Clef lets you pilot, and many of the puzzles in that revolve around the limitation that its weapon can only point in one direction, so you have to find arrows scattered throughout that make the world spin around you at 90 degree intervals to let you shoot at different angles. I did think that moving the bubblebuggy was kind of a pain at times, since it doesn't move slowly like Beatbuddy itself does; instead, it lurches and dashes in time with the beat of the song.

There are some hurdles to overcome when it comes to controlling Beatbuddy. There are three control scheme options: Mouse, Keyboard, and Gamepad. The Keyboard option requires you use the arrow keys to move, space to lunge, and V to attack, but I found this to be too imprecise, and the inability to edit these controls meant I soon moved onto the Mouse control system. This works a little better, but you have to constantly move your mouse in a certain direction if you want to keep moving in that direction in the game, so it only really works until your mouse goes off to the side of your mouse pad. It wasn't until I settled on using a game pad that I was able to control Beatbuddy with ease. With this option you can customize the controls. Unfortunately, you'll still find yourself stuck in walls, trapped between enemies, and not attacking at the correct angles necessary to dispose of foes. It's not a massive hindrance, since there are plenty of health drops to keep you alive, but they're glitches nevertheless.

Beatbuddy's primary visual, audio, and gameplay mechanics revolve around the constant crashing of cymbals, snare, bass, strings, and various other elements needed to make a cohesive song. However, the game isn't just putting the song in the background and timing the enemy actions and obstacle pulsations to sound like they're cohesive, it's actually an amalgamation of sound effects caused by said enemies and obstacles. This means that, if things go even slightly awry, the beat can be messed up, the song can be ruined, and you can literally glitch out of the game. There were over a dozen times where the elements didn't line up in proper harmony for me, or where something didn't happen that was supposed to happen and I was forced to reset my game from the last checkpoint. At one point I got crushed between a spike wall and a door with 0 health, but I didn't die, so I had to reset. At another point I ran through an obstacle course, and the dialogue informing me that I had ten seconds remaining didn't disappear, even after another ten minutes, so I had to reset. It's a real shame; a smudgy blotch on an otherwise fun, original, and pretty game with a great soundtrack.

Beatbuddy has great visual flair to couple with its musically-infused level design. Each and every asset in the game is hand painted and multi-layered, with over a dozen layers in both the foreground and background that shift and move independent of one another. The visuals are crisp, clear, and colorful, and Beatbuddy himself is animated with charm that can't be beaten (heh, punny). He looks kind of like an alien sperm, but he's a cute alien sperm who is more than happy to bounce his head in time with the beat, holding his ethereal headphones to what I imagine is his ear.

Even with the aforementioned control issues and glitches, I can't help but enthusiastically recommend Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians. Never before have I seen audio, visual, and gameplay elements blend together so well to form one cohesive and head-bobbingly fun gimmick. It's not lengthy, at only 6 levels in total with 5 stages per level, but it's longer than it sounds. The marketing states '6 songs', and that's true, but each 'song' is almost an hour long with 5 stages contained within it. There are pink glowing Beat Points scattered throughout each song – hundreds per level – that unlock an in-game developer diary, so there is an incentive to keep you playing if you're so inclined. Even though Beatbuddy certainly has more than its fair share of glitches and minor technical issues, this is still an original, creative labor of love and it's a lot of fun. This is why I've been keeping my ears to the indie tracks, because I want to be there when something like this arrives.  

This review is based on a digital download of Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians for the PC, provided by the publisher.