Stage Fright

Playing an instrument is extremely difficult for most people, unless they happen to be very gifted. Thus, some may have an easy time shredding on the electric guitar while others struggle with basic power chords for their entire life. Still, a lot of practice is needed for one to become an accomplished musician, regardless of how much talent he or she displays.

Stage Fright is a unique video game that combines rhythm with horror elements, which is pretty much unheard of. In essence, you have to keep playing the piano while creepy stuff happens around you, which is easier said than done. The gameplay feels a lot like Guitar Hero, except of course that it’s a bit different, given the fact that you are not playing guitar.

According to the developers, you should be able to use a MIDI controller in the future, which is quite neat. However, a keyboard works just as fine, at least if you can coordinate your hands and remember the key positioning. Unfortunately, there are only two very short levels at the moment, which means that there’s not much of a challenge involved.

The game tries to distract you from the melody with gruesome images and disturbing sounds, but it’s not that scary as of yet. While the apparitions can be pretty spooky, the jump scares are not as traumatic as they need to be in order to scare a mature player. Not only that, but the graphics quality is too poor for that to happen as well.

Speaking of which, the game does not look very fancy, but that should be beside the point when the gameplay idea is so unusual. Unfortunately, the short levels and bad design choices make it difficult to focus on anything else but the terrible visuals. Hence, things could certainly be improved with ease if a little more effort went into the game.

All things considered, Stage Fright is pretty bad right now, but it has the potential to turn things around with ease. Hence, all it needs is a bit more work and better artwork to go along with the music.