- Our App Army took on Sonority this week
- The music-based puzzles delighted our readers
- Cute talking animals were also (unsurprisingly) a big hit
Sonority is a music-based puzzler from Ash Games that puts instrumentation at the heart of everything. That means listening is just as important as what you see. Our App Army community are well-versed in solving puzzles so we handed the game over to them to see if the musical trimmings added something new.
Here’s what they said:
Bruno Ramalho
Here we have an adventure that is very beautiful and satisfying with its musical puzzles. We play as Esther, a young woman who is trying to find a melody that can help heal her friend, Batama, a talking bear. We start our adventure in a ruined kingdom where animals and humans are able to talk to each other, and with a talking racoon guiding us, we have to solve several puzzles to advance through the ruins and discover what happened to everyone.
We don’t need to be experts in music or music notation, but we will have music notes at our disposal (and several musical instruments), that we need to combine and play to move and rotate huge stones, so we can get to inaccessible places. These stones move proportionally to the gaps we set between the notes. We will learn more notes and discover new instruments to play as we progress through the game (interacting with singing stone heads?), which are needed to solve increasingly complicated puzzles.
Depending on your battery or the model of phone you have, it’s a good thing that we have the option to set the quality of the game, which can be very taxing on your CPU, or not. There is no hand-holding in this game, and if you’ve never seen musical notes before, you’ll be scratching your head for a few minutes, but nothing that you can’t learn through trial and error. I quite enjoyed the puzzles and the lore present in this game. The stone heads are very funny and cute, and add some more extra puzzles to the game, like the stone head that you need to play your instrument to, playing all the notes in sequence, to wake her up, and then she will sing the final note that will open a door for us. All in all, very interesting and satisfying game.
Steven Wharry
After seeing the trailer for this game I was very excited as I’d been craving a puzzle game and not only did it look beautiful it also looked interesting with the sound mechanic. I went in with wonder, but I left with disappointment, firstly the game didn’t look as beautiful as I thought it would, although still very good for a puzzle game. There’s no tutorial or direction really, you just have to figure it out yourself. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as I hate hand-holding for too long and I quite enjoy figuring things out myself.
But I felt like the onboarding was terrible and a terrible game design for the start of a new game, I found myself not wanting to play and having to force myself to return to the game. All of which I feel could have been bypassed with a better introduction to the game as the open space, random puzzled blotted around and no direction just didn’t click with me.
Mark Abukoff
This is an interesting music-based puzzler with cute talking animals and really luscious-looking scenery. I was afraid I’d need some knowledge of music to progress in this game but really you don’t. There are points where that could come in handy but you can pick up enough knowledge in-game to get through. The puzzles aren’t too hard to start, but it doesn’t really help you too much either.
But that also left me pretty satisfied to get through them (and the difficulty does ramp up as you go along) There are also eventually more notes and instruments to play which just makes it a better experience. A little taxing on my iPhone 15 Pro Max but even with settings on Max it worked pretty well for me. This is an ambitious game in more than one respect but it’s challenging and really a satisfying experience. Happily recommended.
Jason Rosner
Sonority is a creative new puzzle adventure game where you discover a unique world that uses music to solve challenges to progress throughout the game. While you do need to arrange musical notes in the correct manner, you quickly discover patterns to the nuances of solving each problem. Graphically the game shines, with a wonderfully sculptured world filled with lush, colourful environments. There’s also a rather nicely done story that holds onto your attention, which helps it stand out amongst a generally narrative-lite puzzle field.
You play as a girl named Esther who sets out to help her friend, and like with most journeys, the obstacles you face along the way add a real sense of accomplishment to your desired outcome. This presents us with a cool relationship that we all share with nature. Not only do you interact with music, you soon discover your ability to understand singing stones, as well as a spunky talking racoon, and this adds up to a greater understanding that we are all uniquely connected to each other in our shared spaces. Sonority was clearly crafted with love, and this makes it an easy recommendation for me!
Brian Wigington
Sonority is a charming, cool musical action/puzzle game. The story in a nutshell involves going on a quest, with the help of talking animal friends, to heal your friend. Music acts as a sort of magic to help you move objects and open paths for you to go on your journey. You use your pan flute to play notes to adjust the terrain to build bridges, reach high places or open new areas. You can sort of play by ear or by using the musical note names. This makes the game easy to pick up and play even if you are not musically inclined.
Playing the correct musical sequence will connect a lighted path, causing the terrain to shift and allow you to proceed. You will add more notes to your pan flute as you explore and open a number of major new areas. The graphics are quite sharp and very colourfully saturated. The music notes and tunes in the game have a light feel to them, making the game pretty relaxing. The controls work pretty well with a floating d-pad as well as touch mechanics. I am pretty impressed with Sonority and can recommend it as a very pretty, solid puzzler.
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