As mentioned many times on Higher Plain Games, I love games that attempt to teach music creation in different ways. The stunning ODDADA mastered an abstract way of pulling levers and playing with toys to create sound, but a lot of what was learnt didn’t apply to more commercial or professional tools. This is where Offbeat steps in to bridge the gap. The concept is that you accidentally become a jingle musician using a 4-track synth you’ve inherited from your uncle. From there, you’ll plug in keyboards, effects, and odd toys to create short jingles through to structured melodic songs, all whilst learning how to track music in a way that you could use elsewhere.
Offbeat’s offbeat instrument collection is a wonderful set of barmy toys that you’ll unlock through a catalogue buying system as you earn cash by completing commissions. There’s a cat keyboard, a monkey cymbal crasher, a castle for percussion, a garden gnome for bass voices, and a posher synth. Each instrument comes with multiple upgrades that expand their capability. For example, the cat keyboard (Tiger-001) gets two bonus octaves of note range and a tremolo button for warbling noises. You’ll also get to buy effect instruments like a shredder and a delay pedal. If you plug the castle into the delay pedal, you can create a door-slamming kick drum that echo repeats at a certain speed, or maybe even set it in reverse through the pedal’s upgrades.
Players can afford these instruments when they complete requests, and each request will ask for a specific sound type or instrument. One of your regulars is a goth bog lady who might want a haunted drone sound and a rising melody. By playing with the knobs and faders on the synths, and using the delay pedal to add a long sustain, you’ll be able to create a droning sound with a haunting church bell. As you play notes, coloured pills describing the sound appear, and that explains whether you are meeting the customer request or not. These are colour-coded, and as you discover new descriptions, they are added to your music theory book for future reference. If you are totally new to music production, this part of the game will be a bit like a sandbox puzzle playground to explore.
This brings us to where you’ll spend most of your time: your synth. You can plug in up to four instruments (and they can be routed through an effect each), and each comes with either a piano scroll for clicking notes onto, or a beat track to click percussive notes onto. Whilst MIDI keyboard controllers are going to be added in a post-launch update, at the moment everything requires mouse control to paint your notes onto the piano scroll. If you are tone deaf, you can turn on beginner mode, which only allows a few white notes that align to the key the song is in to be selected. If you like to play dissonance, or want to try out different chord types, a full piano scroll is available. Once you’ve painted the notes and/or beats on, you can listen back to each bar of music, and loop a bar of music infinitely if you want to. I found looping very limited because most requests require a specific thing to happen at a certain time. For example, a rising melody requires notes to go up the scale, and a falling melody is the opposite. Some requests ask for a frantic finale, so you’ll cram notes in back-to-back. The descriptor pills give you feedback, and if you meet the customer’s needs, you’ll earn cash towards your instrument expansion.
My main bugbears with Offbeat come from note placements. There is no undo button, and this becomes a pain when you think you’ve selected a verse, but actually the verse pattern hasn’t appeared on screen; it’s sat behind the pattern you were previously working on. This oddity in jumping between song sections repeatedly caught me out, as I expected what I’d just selected to be what I was creating inside, but it isn’t. Instead, it cues it up as the next thing to note doodle on. The amount of times I’d created a melody only to realise it’s in the wrong part of the song was far too high, and as there’s no undo or bulk move of notes ability, you have to delete each note manually and rebuild it elsewhere.
That niggle aside, where Offbeat absolutely excels is in how this feels like an introduction to Digital Audio Workstations, or DAWs for short. I use commercial DAWs for music production as a hobby and a lot of what you learn in Offbeat can be directly applied to commercial DAWs. Yes, you’ll have more buttons and a lot more flexibility to tweak things behind the scenes (or in the digital synth rack), but the fundamentals will still apply. I saw a comment from a Steam review that said this is a Fisher Price DAW, and it’s a good description. You can get a lot of sound out of the small instrument and effect selection you are given. The 4-track limitation, even in sandbox mode, means you can still be creative with drums, bass, and melodies. You can even export your finished work as a WAV file fopr you own personal or commercial use.
Offbeat lowers the entry to learning a DAW and some limited music theory in a creative and playful way. If you were curious about making music but was worried it’d be overwhelming, the mission structure and supporting tools here will ease you in gently. Offbeat joins ODDADA as two great ways to learn the tactile, creative side of music creation. A great title.
Higher Plain Games is part of the Higher Plain Network. If you like what I do, please consider supporting me via Patreon for as little as $1/£1 a month. There are additional perks for supporting me, such as behind-the-scenes content and downloads. You can also share the website or use the affiliate buy now links on reviews. Buying credit from CD Keys using my affiliate link means I get a couple of pence per sale. All your support will enable me to produce better content, more often. Thank you.
