I’ve never been a fan of open world game design. The reason is simple- I get lost very easily. This is probably why I tend to prefer retro games over modern ones in the first place, open world design being better facilitated by more advanced hardware. That I’m opening with this does not bode well for Chantey, I’m afraid, the recent release for the Chromatic (and also Game Boy and Game Boy Color) which bills itself as an open world rhythm game set in the Carribean Sea during the Golden Age of Piracy.
I have to admit- that’s a pretty great pitch. And let’s just get the positive out of the way first. The world of Chantey is a lot of fun. The skulduggery is silly, but not overly so. Conducting pirates battles entirely by rhythm based matchups of shanties like “what would you do with a drunken sailor?” is an inspired and absurd gameplay direction. Game Boy Studio software and hardware alike handles anachronistic rhythm style gaming a lot better than I’d have expected. While the sync isn’t always quite perfect (even on the Chromatic, the ideal hardware for this game), Chantey is forgiving enough that difficulty isn’t a huge barrier to progression, and for those who like to be challenged, there’s a tougher setting anyway.
Where Chantey isn’t quite so forgiving is in its open world design. To put it bluntly- aside from the main quests and sidequests, there simply isn’t that much to do in Chantey, not even pirate rhythm battles. So, with the only clear direction being to go to large ports to recruit a crew of hard rocking buccaneers, you’re pretty much stuck with just guessing where to go and what to do. The easiest initial quest is in Havana, simply because it’s scripted as soon as you get off the boat. The stealth sections that follow can be somewhat unintuitive, but not hugely so. My bigger problem was triggering a softlock between screen transitions wherein my character disappeared.
Havana was the last port I visited, through sheer bad luck, although the other quests in Maracaibo and Tortuga had their own problems, particularly as I visited those towns first. Maracaibo’s quest is locked behind a cash bribe that’s only clearly communicated as necessary if you have enough money on hand to pay it. I never could figure out how to trigger Tortuga’s quest (I only knew I was supposed to be there because NPCs kept discussing that the buccaneer I was told to recruit was about to be hanged), and gave up entirely when I softlocked myself again by somehow traveling diagonally behind a table in a vain effort to determine if I could actually play cards with an NPC since I was completely out of ideas for how else to trigger the quest.
Even the Havana quest has its problems in that it ends with you having to land on an island that isn’t on the map- something you can do by pressing the select button. I was lucky that I had spoken to a bartender who mentioned this mechanic, although I still ended up having to rely on a real-world map to figure out where the island was. In a sort of perverse way, Chantey demonstrates why more Game Boy games didn’t use open world design and eight-directional movement. It creates exactly these kinds of bugs.
I feel bad being so hard on Chantey like this, because it really does have the bones of a genuinely good game. But ModRetro made a mistake trying to get it out in the first quarter as per their initial promise instead of delaying and giving it another round of decent playtesting. This is a hard game to recommend even bearing in mind that I, personally, do quite poorly with vague event triggers compared to most. After a certain point, talking to every available NPC two or three times, the cute script just loses its charm when what I really need is clearer hints.
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