Game On: Storytelling through music, the Deemo way

Review of Deemo II, a free-to-play musical adventure

By Aditya Deshbandhu

There are few games centred around music the way Deemo II is. This is a game that is not just based on the music for the gameplay it offers but is also set in a world with music at its core.

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A spectacular-looking game, Deemo II is set in a world where rain is ever-present. It spins a narrative where raindrops adversely affect the living and every time a character makes contact with the rain (called ‘hollow rain’), they die by transforming into petals, a phenomenon that the in-game characters call ‘blooming’. Music is at the heart of this world as it not just dispels the clouds and the rain but also unlocks sunlight.

You play the game as Echo, a character that had once bloomed but was returned to the living by a mysterious person called the composer and you traverse the station — a place with a giant piano, searching for ways to unlock new music to fix the world’s many ailings. Deemo II does a wonderful job of painting the world’s problems as it conveys the frustrations of several non-playable characters (NPCs) through several conversations. Its narrative is both layered and interpretative as you unlock the world’s meaning both in the conversations you have and the music you engage with.

Deemo II has two distinct parts in its gameplay, the first is the open world that you explore as Echo and the second is the music-based play that you encounter as you match beats and try to recover lost memories. This isn’t a game that does music for the sake of it as it is the first one I have encountered which recommends the use of wired earphones/headphones for optimum play experience.

Such is the attention to detail that the game even asks players who use wireless gear to calibrate the delay in order to react in the best possible way. This is acoustic-stimulated play at its finest, where the sound determines the reflexes and actions to a much higher degree than the visuals. It took me quite a while to stop relying on the visuals as reacting purely on sound cues is not something I have done in a while.

Deemo II is worth every minute that you put into it. If you engage deeper with the narrative, you will grapple with themes of Alzheimer’s and Dementia as you make sense of Echo’s origins and her connection with the piano.

A must-play in 2022, Deemo II is absolutely fantastic for both the experience it offers and the story it unpacks. You might have to learn to deal with subtitles though and grapple with being tone-deaf. But then, if someone as musically challenged as I can manage, so can you.