Deemo -Reborn-

Genre: Music-Rhythm / Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Deemo -Reborn- (from here on simply called Deemo Reborn) is a re-imagining of the Music-Rhythm game Deemo (and you can read my review of the Nintendo Switch version of the game here). Deemo Reborn features the same basic piano-centric Music-Rhythm gameplay of its predecessor, but presents it with improved graphics and new Graphic Adventure gameplay segments. This game was released on PlayStation 4 in 2019 and ported to PC, mobile devices, and Nintendo Switch in 2020.

It bears mention that the original Deemo was not itself a bad-looking game. It featured absolutely gorgeous artwork and a beautiful soundtrack, and I would argue that its main issue was that the beautiful artwork was delegated to the game’s menus and not present in the actual gameplay itself, which looked plain and a bit bland by comparison. It seems a bit puzzling then, that even though Deemo Reborn is unquestionably a graphically-improved game, it nevertheless makes the same basic mistake.

Once again, the beautiful artwork is limited only to game menus, and the Guitar Hero-esque gameplay is once again depicted as repetitive dark corridors surrounded with a piano motif, although this time one that’s much more beautifully-rendered. Don’t get me wrong, it is an improvement, but one that misunderstands what was wrong with the visuals in the first game.

However, that’s not the only element of the game that sees improved visuals, and now’s as good a time as any to talk about the new Graphic Adventure elements added to the game. In the original Deemo, the music-Rhythm gameplay was presented with a framing device about a young girl who stumbles into the den of a more cuddly version of a Slender Man-style character, and who must play music to grow a tree so that she can climb it and return to the window she fell through. In Deemo Reborn, this story is expanded into a full Graphic Adventure, complete with rooms to explore, puzzles to solve, and characters to meet. These rooms are gorgeously detailed, with nice water and lighting effects and a lot of imagination poured into their design.

However… I’m really conflicted about this addition. On the one hand, the Graphic Adventure elements here are good. The puzzles work well, and there’s enough intrigue and variety in these rooms to make for some good puzzling befitting the genre. On the other hand, I’m just not sure that this style of gameplay belongs here. It breaks up the flow of the game and forces you to completely change what you’re doing even if you’d rather continue on with one game style or the other.

As for the other kind of gameplay, the Music-Rhythm gameplay… well, it’s pretty much just as it was in the original Deemo, which is to say one of the absolute best Music-Rhythm games on the Nintendo Switch… as long as you’re playing the game in handheld mode using the touchscreen. Doing so once again presents gameplay that does a great job creating the same feeling of playing a piano, without necessarily being technically accurate, with the highlight being dragging your finger across the screen to simulate a “glissando” (where the pianist does a similar motion on a keyboard). And as with the original Deemo, Deemo Reborn is playable using traditional gamepad controls, but that experience isn’t nearly as immersive and compelling as the gameplay using the touchscreen.

Finally, I should mention this game’s soundtrack. As with the original Deemo, what’s here is top-notch, featuring a variety of music here from various Asian composers, from classical-style pieces, Jazz, J-Pop, even a few songs from the developer’s other games. With roughly 90 songs (including free downloadable songs), there’s quite a lot of music here… though this game’s track list pales in comparison to that seen in the original Deemo, which has now expanded to 323 thanks to free DLC.

All things considered, Deemo Reborn is still a phenomenal Music-Rhythm game, and the Graphic Adventure elements here are solid as well, but I feel like adding those elements dilutes the experience, and the music tracklist simply can’t hold a candle to the still-expanding track list of the original game. As such, I think this is still a superb game that’s well worth playing, but given the choice I think I’d prefer to just keep playing the original Deemo, even if it’s not as visually-impressive as this game.

tl;dr – Deemo Reborn is a re-imagining of the original Deemo that takes the piano-focused Music-Rhythm gameplay of the original, improves the graphics, and adds new Graphic Adventure elements. The graphics are definitely an improvement here, and both the Music-Rhythm and Graphic Adventure gameplay is top-notch, but the two gameplay styles don’t work all that well together, and the much smaller track list compared to the original Deemo means that even though this is still a great game, it doesn’t quite measure up to its predecessor.

Grade: A-

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