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The Hexagroove dev’s new 90s musical puzzler Backbeat is a puzzle game with XCOM strategy mashupsBust a move
Bust a move
Ventura was at BitSummit to showcase the successor to this game, Backbeat. It’s a bit of a departure from much of his past work, acting more like a puzzle game with a musical soul, albeit one where the act of creating and playing music together is imbued into every solution. As the crowd began to leave the bustling convention hall for the day, I went to the booth for one last demo, and the chance to speak to the person behind it all… who was sat at his demo kiosk playing the keytar.
Backbeat Gameplay Trailer #1Watch on YouTube
Backbeat Gameplay Trailer #1
Still, as something quite new for the developer, I can’t deny I wasn’t curious what the inspirations were behind Backbeat, and the journey to get to this point. So, we started at the beginning. The very beginning. “When I was young, for whatever reason, music really resonated with me,” Ventura said, as we spoke about his initial passions for music and rhythm games. At first, this love of music was as far as it went, with no formal training or pathway to becoming a pro musician. In the end, though, blending music and games was perhaps the logical endgame for this love.
“My little brother and I, we used to have games where we’d sit in the backseat of the car,” he went on. “One of us would hum a melody from a Nintendo game while the other one guessed which game it was, and it was always game music. We enjoyed playing Nintendo games a lot as kids, so when I got into college, I kind of wanted to start dabbling in that and I got some direction to go into technology. But I wanted to do artsy stuff, too. When I finally got around to starting in games in Japan, I worked at iNiS. And that was their forte, it was a group of musicians that had founded a game company, and that’s something that I’ve carried with me throughout my entire career.”
It was a fulfilling but difficult decade in games, having worked on over a dozen titles in that time. Ventura left iNiS and moved to Sweden to work on music software away from the industry, in part to transport lessons on getting music into useful tools, but also to do something away from the toil and grind of it all. Jumping from this back into games was inevitable to him, but still far from an easy task.
A shot of Hexagroove
“I told myself when I moved away from Japan, I gave myself a max of five years before I wouldn’t be able to resist being away from games,” Ventura admitted. “Even though I was a little burnt out at the time, I knew it would come back to me in the end. I wanted to get back to the really small kind of thing that’s very pure and simple and passionate and resonates with people. And the only way you can do that is if you’re an indie.”
With this in mind, for a creator whose games are so directly involved in the act of performing music - whether that be the DJ styles of Hexagroove, the cheerleading of Elite Beat Agents or even the act of singing in Lips - Backbeat is a notable departure. Even being built upon many of the tools the company had refined in their previous project, a look at the game reveals a title less about the act of performing and more a story-driven experience questioning thewhyof performing.
The result is an intriguing game about the reasons people create music, wrapped in the sensibilities of the 1990s. This even includes the game’s Geocities-inspiredofficial website. The music of the period is naturally befitting of the game too, with a predominantly funk sound chosen in part because of how well the instrument delineation worked for multi-character puzzles (although city pop, dance and even ska were also on the table). It also has the more wistful tone to match the game. “Nowadays, you don’t hear a whole lot of funk, but it’s toe tapping, and it’s much easier to dance to maybe then something like ska,” said Ventura. “We wanted to produce a feeling that was folksy and positive. It’s a lighthearted story; there’s a bit of drama here and there, but we want everybody to have a good time.”
How this turns out remains to be seen, although we shouldn’t have long to wait, since the release is scheduled for the first months of 2023. Backbeat has the potential to be an entertaining puzzle title for fans of the genre, while bringing a flair from musicians like Jem Finer (the saxophonist in The Pogues). It’s a game celebrating that spark of creativity we all should cherish.
