My initial thought when starting Seaven Studio’s Inside my Radio was that platformers can be hard enough as it is without forcing all my actions to the beat of a song– which is just plain harsh. The nice thing about Inside my Radio is that it is very forgiving for not being able to do something to the beat. Rhythmic help, frequent checkpoints, and short sequences that involve multiple button presses are a blessing to those who can’t get behind the game’s rhythm-based platforming. What all of this help demonstrates though is just how much the game is unwilling to acknowledge its own shortcomings– even when faced with the task of upping the game’s difficulty to reflect the heightened action.
Drenched in so much style, it is hard to dismiss Inside my Radio as just another indie platformer. It moves like a lot of other games, but its art is distinct enough to separate it from the pack. Deriving a lot of its influence from circuitry and cyberpunk culture, the environments are vibrant and evocative of the game’s title. Players take control of LED sprites, each responsible for bringing back different styles of music to a dying boombox lying out in an alley. Your journey consists of trying to bring back electro, dub and disco music by inhabiting the sprites of three different LEDs.
Told as a frame narrative, Inside my Radio plays with plotting by having characters like Barry (the Disco-centric LED) retell their adventures that have led to the point of the story in which they run into the main character of the game, Trek. Ultimately, Trek is the only character who players will control that doesn’t involve going back in time and retelling events of the story that precede the current ones. He also acts as the difficulty checkpoint as the game gets slightly more difficult with each scene he is re-introduced in. However, as much as the game is able to demonstrate the difficulty increases, it isn’t by much at all and most people will be able to maneuver through an area without much issue as long as the rhythmic help is on. That option with no punishment makes any difficulty feel trivial.
Even in time trial mode, though rhythmic help is available, it still has some difficult moments. For example, I found time frequently running out before I could even get a minute into the level. It’s not that the platforming is difficult, but the time constraints seem too tightly wound and one wrong move can be enough to topple your entire run. In fact, the platforming is actually mundane and extremely linear. I found a secret area at one point, but I’m still not sure what happened there. Despite its very linear structure, Inside my Radio does continually add new obstacles to contend with as each level is introduced. These new additions are often genuinely fun, and when the game re-introduces them throughout later levels they are satisfying to traverse.
Adding to the variety in obstacles is an even more varied sound design. Every environment is centered around a specific style of music. There is a style button that is dedicated to activating some contextual switches and otherwise just letting you add a little more flavor to the environment. Regardless of the character you’re using, the types of sounds emitted from button presses, including the style button, depends on the environment. Being in a disco environment means you’re going to make disco sounds, but if its the second disco environment you’re in then the sounds will have changed. Little touches like this benefit the style of Inside my Radio, but it doesn’t amount to much more than aural pleasure.
But Inside my Radio is not a game that seems to care much more about its gameplay than its style, anyways. It is centered around bringing music back to a dying boombox and its dependency on music feels natural and sustained throughout the brief story. I ran through all of Inside my Radio in about 90 minutes, and that’s mainly because it doesn’t have any real challenge to it. It doesn’t penalize the player for using its rhythmic help system, and it frequently checkpoints after any small component of an already small platforming sequence. The only part where the game requires some thinking is in very minute puzzles that often can be solved by simply doing the same thing on each one. Its an arbitrary roadblock almost all of the time.
There was one puzzle that happened in a level a couple times that did end up feeling like it had some challenge to it, but it was mostly memorization. Boss battles happen occasionally in the game as well and require a little bit of thinking, but mainly just for the final boss which utilizes all three characters from the game, but is hardly memorable in its execution. The weird thing is that I did end up enjoying my time with Inside my Radio, I just never felt like it added much to the platforming genre. It is comfort food for platforming fans who have been craving more titles like Housemarque’s Outland, or the more apt-comparison, Queasy Games’s Sound Shapes – a game that also heavily utilizes environments in its puzzles, but is far more engaging and difficult than Inside my Radio. If you want something to play and beat in a single sitting without feeling bored, this is a game that is constantly introducing variety to its levels, even if the variety is something you’ve seen a million times before.