Urban fantasy, hand-drawn art, story-telling and LOTS of piano

Deemo is a great, tapping and rhythm-based game where you play beautifully haunting piano music.

What is Deemo?

Deemo is a game in the same vein as guitar hero. The point of the game is to play a variety of piano-based songs. Each song has three difficulty levels: easy, medium, and hard. Initially, you don’t start out with many songs. As you accumulate more experience by completing the levels, more songs are unlocked.

This is a nice change from the current trend of musical games that offer you a very limited initial library without inapp purchases. Although later songs are only available via purchase, you still have a pretty good collection to choose from. However there is one slight freemium downside: unless you purchase the full version, you’ll have to wait an average of 45 seconds before each song. 

The overall tone of the game is rather dark and moody. The main character, Deemo, bears a striking resemeblance to The Nightmare Before Christmas star, Jack Skeleton. Outside of a few peppy songs, Deemo is musically very melancholy.

In regards to the story, I couldn’t make any sense of it from simply playing the game so I’ll let the official website for Deemo explain it: “Deemo is a mystic character lives [sic] in solitude, a castle, all by itself. A little girl falls from the sky, not knowing who she is, where she comes from. To help the little girl back to her world, Deemo comes to realize a tree keeps growing tall on top of the piano.”  The idea is that the more you successfully play songs on your piano, the taller the tree will grow and the little girl can go back home. 

Deemo also offers up the option to share your scores via social networks Twitter and Facebook.

How to make music

Before you begin playing, Deemo calibrates itself so it can correctly recognize the timing of your taps. After that, playing the game is quite simple. Like Dance Dance Revolution or Tap Tap Revenge, notes move down the screen. When they reach a line on the bottom of the screen, you have to tap in the corresponding location. The closer you are to being on beat, the more points you receive.

Deemo must be played with at least two fingers, especially at later difficulties, as you’ll have to multiple keys at once. Overall, the controls are very intuitive and you won’t face any response issues.

Deemo looks and sounds beautiful

The artwork for the game is absolutely beautiful. Frames are beautifully drawn and the dark style of the characters compliments the music perfectly. At times it feels like you are reading an elegant graphic novel.

The music is obviously the highlight of the game. The game has an impressively large catalog featuring songs that include haunting piano melodies as well as upbeat tunes with shades of J-Pop. All of the songs have a high replay value so you’re not likely to get sick of hearing them. Playing with headphones is a must because your device’s speakers simply won’t do justice to the quality of production that went into these songs.  

It’s an outstanding music game

Deemo is a great game with simple controls and an outstanding soundtrack.