Wejam

Genre: Music Creation Application

Players: 1-3 Co-Op (Online)

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Review:

Wejam, released on PC in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024, is a family-friendly Music Creation Application where players arrange one or two points on a screen to play various notes in time with a rhythm.

How it works is that the music acts in different ways depending on where your cursor is on-screen. Where you are vertically on-screen determines your pitch, what note you’re playing. And where you are horizontally determines your tempo, how frequently your notes are playing. So playing notes in the upper-left plays high notes at a slow rate (but still in time with the beat), while playing in the lower-right plays low notes at a high rate.

Players can use two sticks to stretch their one note into a bar, playing from one to four notes between, depending on how long it is, or using the L, R, ZL, and ZR buttons to play individual notes on that bar if you want to try to create a melody. Players can have the game memorize a loop of notes while you go off and play a different series of notes on top of that loop, and you can change the note sound and the beat that’s playing to switch things up.

All of this is represented with vague glowy shapes in the areas where you’re playing notes, in bright colors against the dark background, which gives the visuals an abstract, minimalist neon vibe that works well with the game’s mostly synth music tones.

So the question is, how does all of this work. Is it functional? Could you use it to actually make music? Well, sort of. The tools here are pretty limited. You can’t save anything you make, can’t set it up to play specific notes or plan out a specific song. I could see someone who has practiced with this program using it to perform some sort of live background music-ish stuff for a party or something, but you’re not likely to make any especially catchy melodies using it.

The game does also allow for players to join with others online to create music in co-op, but as of this writing there don’t appear to be any players currently using the game, so if you do this you’ll need to bring your own friends.

In the end, I think Wejam does attempt something relatively unique in the Music Application space, but it’s limited in its ability to produce something deliberately designed, and I would say that while the sounds it produces are certainly musical, I think it’s subjective whether you’d actually call it music (much in the same way that birdsong is musical but not necessarily music). I can see some very niche ways that this app might be useful, and I suppose as a musical toy it’s something that may prove to be an interesting time-waster, but I don’t think anyone is likely to be using this for too long before they grow bored and move on to something else.

tl;dr – Wejam is a family-friendly Music Creation Application where players move a cursor on-screen to enter tones based on where the cursor is when you press the button. It’s an amusing toy, but not especially useful for creating deliberate music, and I can’t see many people using this for more than a short while before growing bored with it and moving on.

Grade: C+

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