Distortions
Distortions is a story-driven musical journey through an unknown, imaginary world. Enter a surreal adventure guided by journal riddles – and piece together fragments of past memories to uncover your identity. Using a violin, play unique songs to alter environments and befriend strange creatures along the way.
* Use the power of music to shape in real time a stunning open world full of natural beauty and surreal environments.
* Experience a compelling story of perseverance, mystery, and memory.
* More than 15 hours of gameplay
* Learn to use 5 unique abilities to tame or control fearsome creatures.
* Enjoy multiple gameplay styles – from side-scrolling and open-world exploration to innovative modular gameplay that changes with the rhythm of the story.
* Learn 3 different ways to play your violin.A DIZZYING WORLD OF SOUND & FURYA girl wakes up in an unknown and imaginary place where her past seems to have a physical presence and is made from echoes of distorted memories.
The Distortions World is a place of unparalleled beauty filled with mountains, caves, and rivers. It’s a place where old friends still wonder, and where time seems to have stopped in face of an imminent collapse.
While she recovers her identity by reminiscing with the help of a strange masked man, she must decide what to leave behind to move on with her life.
The Girl then decides to explore this surreal and unknown place – soon finding a journal with a few annotations leading to a violin. With her music, the Girl gets to shape the world – creating extraordinary effects and changes. With each new piece of music, a new tool arises.
She must face the mysterious creatures that inhabit this puzzling world while solving the journal’s riddles. With the journal to show her the way, and the violin to open her path, the Girl embarks on a journey to her past – finding the memories that open the door to her future and discovering the enigma of existing in that place.
How far must she go to regain her memory?
The unknown, puzzling valley is where The Girl’s past seems to have a physical presence — where everything you see is made of echoes of distorted memories.
The "Distortions" world is a place of unparalleled beauty, where you can explore mountains, caves and rivers; a place where old friends still wonder, and where time seems to have stopped in face of an imminent collapse.
Welcome to an adventure where the songs are your weapons and the tales of a journal are your guide.
Lead The Girl through the most diverse locations using the power song to shape the world. Create bridges, explosions and barriers or become invisible, move enormous rocks and learn to speak to the valley with your violin.
There are strange creatures in this world. As you meet those creatures, you must read the environment and use the learned abilities learned to combat them. Each spaces where you encounter them is designed in a way to present new and unexpected behaviors each time. This makes the player face challenges differently — using new strategies and combining the song’s powers to create the perfect way out. By shaping the environment in real time, you determine how The Girl can fight or escape.
With the violin, The Girl learns five different abilities, and 3 different ways to play the violin. You must master these to beat the Masked Creatures. To execute those abilities, we used mechanics inspired in "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time", "Loom", “Guitar Hero” and other instrument-based games.
Many sequences and breathtaking moments will require skill. Find safe places to rest and search for strange white apples to raise your health. Sail the sea and explore the land, with the help of maps, ocean currents information and geographic points, experiencing memorable action and suspenseful moments.
You can also play your violin freely! In this "free mode," the valley can listen to what you play. Some places are more sensitive to the music, and if the right notes are played, the world can be shaped. You can also play with an inhabitant of this world, “The Masked One,” and achieve intense and dramatic moments through his reactions.
There is a strange world that coexists with the "Distortions" valley called the "White World."
Throughout the game, you’ll have to walk between these two worlds to escape the masked creatures or find an otherwise unreachable spot.
To maintain a rhythm, Distortions features several nuances to emphasize the story and convey emotion successfully. These moments include various perspectives such as first person, side-scrolling, open world, linear sessions, and contemplative moments.
Progression is divided into three parts. First, your path will work in a linear way while you become acclimated with the controls and basic aspects of the adventure. Next, you will find an open world to explore with the option to decide which places to visit first. There are also a few dungeons to complete in this part. Lastly, you will find a mix of open world and linear aspects. Here you can find the larger share of secondary missions and optional content, which add several more hours of exploration.
Distortions’ visual and narrative elements were inspired by movies as Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and The Fountain, Where The Wild Thins Are and games as Shadow of the Colossus and “Silent Hill 2.”Sound EffectsThe soundtrack is comprised of licensed songs from three different bands – A post rock band from Brazil, Labirinto and another one from the United States, Dredg – and exclusive original tracks. The ambient sound is composed by noise, combined with instruments like bells, violins and guitars.
Steam User 45
Distortions
A visual and audible treat with an interesting and memorable story, unfortunately marred by stability issues.
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Overview
Distortions is an adventure/puzzle game set in a beautiful but strange world of memories where you reminisce about past relationships and try to overcome your demons. With the help of your violin you begin to piece back the memories you have lost and navigate the strange and wonderful environment.
Game Breakdown
The game has three large chapters and should take around 10-13 hours to complete. I have seen walkthrough videos completing it in 5.5 hours though. There are quite a few puzzles in the game which can be solved using the ability of music. The main character has lost her memory and as she progresses through the story she remembers that she can play the violin. As she plays the violin the world is affected in different ways by her playing. The land begins to change in good and bad ways. As she continues her journey she remembers parts of her memory and acquires special powers which she can use by playing certain notes on her violin. Special abilities include a protection song which helps make you invulnerable for a few seconds; a barrier song which can stop evil things attacking you or hold back falling objects; a bridge song which can help you cross large gaps and a force song which can move objects out of the way. To use any of these abilities you must play the correct notes in the right order for the right amount of time.
Throughout the world are scattered journal notes which help you remember your past and also guide you in solving puzzles. There are also white apples which you can collect that give you extra health which you can use when in trouble.
Gameplay: 🕹️
The gameplay is the weakest element to the game. The controller is far too sensitive which makes navigating narrow ledges and tight gaps frustrating, and the camera angles are sometimes bizarre. This sends your character jumping or running in the wrong direction. At times I was pressing down on the controller to go forward and visa versa. These moments are fleeting though and you soon get used to the situation and what you need to do. To be fair the game is programmed with a keyboard and mouse in mind so a controller is just an added feature. I found in the main that a controller was fine but in a couple of instances with very narrow ledges I switched to keyboard to complete.
The way the game saves your progress is a bit annoying. Throughout the game there are small caves where you can save your progress. At the moment this is the only place you can save your game and then load. If you die whilst playing the game you usually spawn pretty close to where you died but if you quit the game it will load the game from the last cave. Be careful and mindful when quitting the game. I think this would be fine but due to some stability issues throughout the game I did experience the odd crash which sent me back to the last cave. I had to complete the scene again. I have spoken to the developer about this and he is very keen to help. He spent a few hours going through logs and bug reports trying to find the issues I was experiencing and offered me a save game. The crashes did not appear to be fatal every time though and with perseverance I did manage to navigate through the places where it crashed the second time. It appears that some people do experience crashes and some people do not. Although annoying at the time I am still glad that I didn’t give up and miss out on such a wonderful game. The developer is very willing to take on suggestions and has agreed to look at adding more save places.
The main mechanic in the story is your violin. You have free play where you play the notes as you like or you use your violin to cast powerful abilities. Pressing and holding RB brings out your violin. Pressing up, left, right on your d-pad and the B button plays the notes. The notes you need to play are quite easy and you won’t have much difficulty in getting the notes right. The process is a lot like a very basic Rocksmith where you press the corresponding direction button when the cursor is over the note.
Story:
The story is where this game really shines. If you can look past the minor irritations of joystick controls and crashes then you will be rewarded with a well told and memorable story. The story probably means different things to different people and I imagine it can be interpreted in lots of different ways. Love, loss, regret, fear are all explored in very unusual ways aided by a strange narrator in a mask. Who is he? Can she remember her forgotten memories and let go of the past? The story is told very well through action scenes within the game and then cut scenes. The art style is beautiful and very unusual. I really enjoyed the ending to the game.
Sound: 🎵
The sound is amazing. I suppose when you build a game around music it is important to have a good soundtrack. This game certainly does not disappoint. From great wind and special effects to the haunting soundtrack played at key moments. It all adds to the emotion and ambience. At moments of high tension and danger the sound is used to create a sense of panic and horror. At some points the music got louder and louder and louder until I had to turn it down. It’s all there to create an effect though and it worked.
Graphics: 📺
Stunning graphics. The scenery is amazing and it has the best cloud and water effects I have seen in a game. I just liked looking at the suns reflection in the water as the yellow glow bobbed up and down with the waves. It was beautiful. The creatures were excellently drawn and the movement was very realistic. The visuals are a huge plus for the game.
Conclusion
I loved this game. It was original, unusual, sensitive and scary in places. The excellent graphics and sound created a wonderful environment to explore and solve puzzles in. I’m glad I stuck with the game and replayed the sections that crashed. It was annoying but well worth the effort. It’s such a shame the stability issues exist as I would have quite easily given it a 9 without them.
Pros: 👍
Amazing visual treat
Wonderful soundtrack and special effects
Memorable storyline with unusual and original ideas
Cons: 👎
Controller movement is too sensitive and hard to keep character running in a straight line or navigating thin ledges.
Stability issues especially on chapter 2 for me. Had a few crashes during the game.
Steam User 44
An interesting premise. Reminds me of games like Remember Me and Hellblade.
Beautiful art and music design.
Terrible Camera: It variously jumps from first person to top down, to Resident Evil style Camera switching to side-scrolling. This is all touted as a feature but in its current state, it is very much a bug.
I haven't gotten very far into the story yet because the tutorial alone is about 45 minutes.
Might be a tad expensive in its current state.
Steam User 28
”Despite of design flaws, Distortion is unique ride of remembering and music”
Indie games always come up with something we used to like or overlook with unique settings. It’s a reason I want to support their idea and share to the others. Distortion is a story-driven adventure developed by Brazilian team which caught my attention last year, not by graphics, but musical gameplay and settings.
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Coexisting Worlds
Distortion brings your adventure to unparalleled world. You play a girl wakes up in imaginary place who suffers from amnesia. The only way is to explore and fine fragment of memory from each place and journals. The world of Distortion lives up to its name. It’s surreal, mystery, and connects to event of girl’s past by real-world entities. Yet, it has breathtaking landscape from broken bridge to sky tower built around shaped stones.
As you advanced through the story, you will encounter giant masked creature that hold the secret of this world and the violin as the girl learns the power of music to shape up the world.
With powerful intro, the story becomes intriguing as the game lets player to learn backstory from environment and set of messages as piece of memories. It’s quite interesting and can be interpreted in different meanings even though it can be confusing at a time and lack of proper to explanation to some players. It still keeps me engaging from memorable scenes to the finale.
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Adventure of Lone Musician
The gameplay is involved around exploration, power-based puzzle, and chasing sequence. As musician, your main tool is old violin use for solving puzzle. You explore the area and gain access to power for unlocking another area. Using power is very simple, you equip violin and press/hold on correct note (Do, Re, Mi, Fa). Each power has fixed preset and effectiveness based on your play. It’s not hard and easy to master compared to most rhythm games. There are not much of power types due to simple design of puzzle and platforming. Moreover, you can also play freely or specific note to trigger story event.
You will later encounter shadow creatures. They will chase and attack you in certain area and chase sequence. It forces to use approach carefully for exit route and use noise power to avoid detection. Some can be bit tricky and require almost perfect timing where you need to use multiple powers to escape. Luckily, the checkpoints are forgiving, but don’t forget to manually save the progress in cave spot before quit the game.
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Shaped up by Melody
The sound designs are quite good and play accordingly to environment. For example; the gusts sound on high ground and indoor echo in water cave. In contrast, shadow creature sounds are terrified and disturbing in good way. There might be some big drop when the action affects various prop and environment and weird audio cut. The original soundtrack is very well composed. It’s charming, powerful, and motivated to keep the feel of wondering and travel despite of looping in long sequence.
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Stumble in Gap of Darkness
Although, Distortion has great visual design and interesting gameplay, but technical problems and flawed design can drive some people off. The problems are inconsistent and subjective that some might experience game-breaking bug or crash with certain action. It doesn’t happen in my playthrough, but visual and animation bugs can be visually annoying. For example, the game accidentally drop player during moving platform causes player stuck in loop animation or movement glitches due to geometry design and stiff animation. Transition between sequence (cutscene > third-person) can prevent player movement for few second, this becomes worse when you are in middle of chase sequence.
The game also lacks visual guidelines in some areas (especially where you encounter shadow creatures). With timing and lack option of defense, you are mostly overcame by swarm and blindly forced to do trial and error which is frustrating.
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Performance
I found the game run quite solid and optimized on my 7 years old hardware with max settings. The game uses dead engine called c4 Engine (probably personal build). It shows impressive render of terrain and keep details from far distance. Unfortunately, it has few frames drop in some area due to amount of additional effects, no option to tone down bloom, and many unpolished levels (floating foliage/trees).
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Verdict
In my opinion, Distortion is not a bad game; it’s quite above an average adventure for 7-10 hours experience. It’s ambitious project with many interesting elements, but it requires more testing and polish. If you’re interested in surreal adventure game despite of design flaws, I could give this game a try as it rewards you with powerful consequence and idea about life.
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Steam User 9
So the good news is that this game had some of the most artistically beautiful graphics I've ever seen in a game. The controls are simple and work smoothly. I had difficulty progressing through many parts of the game, and I needed a walkthrough to get me unstuck from not knowing what to do next.
The bad part was that I kept freezing up. The music would continue, but my screen was black except for the violin playing graphics. I must have experienced this at least 20 times, and all I could do was quit the game and lose quite a bit of progress back to my last save. Which brings up my pet peeve.....the game only saves when you encounter different save points. I died about a hundred times, so this became an issue having to repeat many difficult scenes. Sometimes I had to leave the game for days before wanting to try it again.
My biggest complaint is when I froze up near the ending, when I was on the raft and the commentary was about the King who built the ivory room. That was the end of the game for me - it would never progress beyond that point without freezing up. I resorted to watching a walkthrough to see how it ends. That was sad.
In spite of the negative things, believe it or not, I am still recommending this game! Artwork was sensational, music good. Much gameplay was very satisfying and fun. It's very unusual and worth seeing if you are the kind of person that likes a unique game. But be advised, you may have to deal with the freezing up issues until they are hopefully corrected.
Steam User 3
Distortions is an indie game by Brazilian developer Among Giants. Released on Steam, it compasses many genres, but it is best described as Walking Simulator with survival elements and a riveting soundtrack.
Distortions really shines when you consider the world and the soundtrack. The story and the characters are lacking in depth, though. It only gives a vague idea of what actually happened and led to the current situation.
In Distortions, you’ll often go back and forth between this world and one similar to ours. Built from the girl’s memories and linked to her past, it’s devoid of color. A major chunk of the story is uncovered in these white spaces.
There is a whole lot of running around in this musical adventure. Chapters often culminate into the girl getting some new tune or ability and in the aftermath the surrounding environment comes crumbling down and you’re supposed to make it out of there in a fixed time.
When we played Distortions, there were multiple bugs and glitches in the gameplay. However, I'm glad to confirm that most of them have been ironed out now.
Pros:
Beautiful world
Top-notch soundtrack
Good graphics
Abstract but thought provoking story
Cons:
Characters lack depth
Limited spells/tunes
Gameplay gets somewhat repetitive
Steam User 7
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"The review about that one game I really wished I could have liked more."
There’s this moment, quite early on in Distortions, that suddenly turned my expectations of the game on their head. Until then, it had been the tale of an amnesiac girl slowly exploring a weird world that was full of whimsical landscapes and hints at painful memories, but nothing that hadn’t been seen before. It felt like it borrowed C.S. Lewis-styled fluff, but leant heavily on a wonderfully captivating introduction that rapidly cycled through various game locations in an effort to purposefully disorientate, linked together by hissing static. After that, for a while, it’s all wandering around, finding journal pages and listening to the on-again-off-again narrator drop infrequent slivers of information.
But then you see something sparkle in a nearby rock formation, and you move on to investigate. It turns out to be one giant, hollow stone; you enter it at ground level, climb its rocky innards to investigate the light source and then leave via a convenient ledge. It takes less than a minute but, during this time – and with zero fanfare – the outside world has changed. Sixty seconds ago, it was as normal as a small woodland patch situated on a chunk of floating earth could have been; now, the ground is covered in a wispy fog. Visibility is low, and stumbling off the edge means a fall into infinity.
Everything feels wrong. Just on the edges of your vision, you can make out blurry humanoid silhouettes, but they melt into nothing if you try and draw near. For a while, you’re hopelessly isolated, left to stumble around in the mist without direction. And then you hear a faint off-key wail. It grows louder as you move towards a small grove, so you follow the sound because that seems to be the only option you have. It leads you to your violin; a significant discovery awarded just the right amount of fanfare.
This is just a small section of Distortions, probably only lasting a scant handful of minutes at best, but it demonstrates one of the strongest moments of the game. Like when you find yourself running through a rapidly darkening forest, following fluttering ribbons tied to trees to reach scattered shelters. Dawdle or lose your way, and the things that live in the descending gloom stake their claim on you. Ghostly figures or wisps of light sometimes act like guides but, for the most part, you’re on your own. Moments such as these are captivating and powerful, and they sometimes do enough to help you forget what an often clumsy and laborious game Distortions can often be.
Your unnamed protagonist doesn’t have any clue where she is. There’s a massive chained monster hidden behind a painted mask that’s forever looming in the background, and the closest thing she has to a goal is that, if she wants to get out of this world with her memories returned, she needs to wake it up. So she’s left to explore the floating world she’s stranded on, collecting handwritten pages, because it’s always handwritten pages. You learn early on that there’s power in your music, and that by playing the right sequences of notes on you violin, you can make subtle changes in the world. Only, they’re not always for the better.
// Full Review
Steam User 5
absolutely gorgeous graphics and stellar soundtrack. story-driven with a specific path to follow as you try to figure out where you are, who you are, and why you're doing what you're doing. very interesting game play that uses music as a defensive and offensive tool or weapon. there were moments of pretty real terror and deep pathos. suffers from a few minor bugs, but that could also be my (old) graphics card. i totally recommend this for anyone looking for something new and eccentric.