Instead of creating music for the game, the developers created the game for the music, sourcing songs from various indie electronic artists. It’s cool that every stage begins with the title of the song and artist, so you can look them up afterwards and support their work. Fortunately, Just Shapes & Beats does include an easier mode perfect for those who want to enjoy the music without the stress of getting absolutely obliterated by the bullet-hell mayhem.Įach stage is composed to slightly differing subgenres of electronic music dubstep, house, and trap are among some of the sounds you will encounter in Just Shapes & Beats’ discography. Like many bullet-hell games, you have a dash ability which allows you to pass through shapes momentarily without taking damage, but the trick is precisely timing the dash and thinking ahead to gauge when and where your next dash will take place. To avoid taking damage, you are able to move your square all over the screen, but the only method of surviving is avoidance. Just Shapes & Beats taps into the bullet-hell ideology of throwing many obstacles in your way at any given time, making for a hectic scramble to keep your eyes and ears open to see where the next shape will come from. Sounds simple, yeah? Not in the slightest. As the title suggests, shapes of varying sizes appear on-screen in time with each song’s beats, and it is your job to avoid making contact with said shapes. Controlling your cyan-coloured square, it is your goal to avoid every obstacle until reaching the stage’s end.

Each stage is set to a single song, to which all of the action is synchronised. This story mode enlists players to encounter selections of standalone stages in order to progress to the big bad finale.

Conjuring thoughts of the surrealist 2D adventure Pony Island, Just Shapes & Beats features a minimalist glitched-out art design comprised of mainly black backgrounds, with hints of colour used to illustrate the game’s environments and characters. I recently attended a gig filled to the brim with electronic artists who each had their own flavour of synthesisers and beats – all the while I was thinking to myself how great their tracks would be for Just Shapes & Beats, the rhythm-based audiovisual assault on Switch.įorming the crux of Just Shapes & Beats is its single-player story, following a small 2D square attempting to restore its world distorted by an aggressive monstrosity.

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