Video Game, 2022
Melatonin is challenging in the wrong ways, which works against the relaxing atmosphere of its lo-fi soundtrack and gorgeous, lavender-drenched visuals.
At its best, the game leads you towards a flow state. “Work” cleverly encourages you to follow the audio cues as much as the visual ones by making the ringing phones and computer noises constant, while any given cubicle will eventually pan offscreen and you’ll have to flick your eyes over to another one. “The Past” hypnotizes with its ensemble of sensory treats: the imagery of an endless clothesline of photographs; the satisfying sounds of a camera shutter and the click-and-whoosh of a Zippo lighter; the controller vibration when a photograph catches fire or turns to ash.
However, other levels break immersion with unnecessary speedbumps. Some of these are audiovisual misalignments. In “Followers”, which has you jumping from smartphone to smartphone, I had to repeatedly fight my instinct to jump on contact with the app-icon platform and instead jump a moment later when the platform touches the phone screenThe tutorial has an explicit warning to press the button on launch, but I would have preferred if the correct action were the one that felt natural.. Other sources of frustration are gotchas. “Time” has a visual cue that’s deliberately misleading, a sequence in which three clocks come out of a wormhole where only one entered. In “Desires”, the level with the crane game, distinguishing the slow motion from the fast motion is purely a test of reaction time.
The window for perfect hitsThe window can be widened via the “Wiggle Room” accessibility setting, but I think the game would be more enjoyable with a more forgiving default. is unforgiving enough that I would regularly get the occasional “early” or “late” unless I made a conscious shift to play more mechanically. It’s not hard to turn on that kind of laser focus, but as a result, I often found myself tense and frantic when everything else about the game seems to be encouraging me to be the opposite. If Melatonin leaned more towards a minigame collection than a rhythm game, it would be easier to shrug off a missed note, but the tight audiovisual feedback loop makes your missteps feel jarring.
I think the level that concludes each night would play more comfortably if there were some indicator of what the next sequence would be. As is, the instantaneous transition from one minigame to another makes the scramble to hit the first action more panicked than it is exciting.
I rarely noticed an appreciable difference in the difficulty between normal and hard levelsIn fact, the hard levels sometimes felt easier if their twist was the increased speed; the window for perfect hits doesn’t scale with tempo as far as I can tell, counterintuively making the slower sections more error-prone.. For the most part, the game appears to be designed as though faster speed and more complex inputs are the main source of difficulty, whereas my experience was that most of the actual difficulty is determined by how clearly the game prompts you. The exception that proves the rule is “Nature”’s hard mode, which removes the water droplet visual cues above the plant being watered. Here, it was the lack of signaling that made the level impossible for me to play smoothly until I relearned the patterns from scratch based on the audio cues alone.
None of these roadblocks is especially offensive on its own; it’s easy enough to learn any given quirk after practicing the sequence a couple of times. Particularly given the game’s relaxed aesthetic, though, I think it’s a missed opportunity not to tune the game such that the first playthrough is a more fluid experience.
The soundtrack is pleasant and is carefully crafted to pair with each level’s sound effects, but it’s not something that I’m inspired to listen to outside of gameplay.
There’s often a tonal disconnect between the game’s pastel-pink styling and the anxiety at the core of what’s being depicted in some of the levels, especially the earlier ones, which deal with the character’s more concrete concerns. Melatonin does an admirable job of finding a whimsical way to portray things that are tied to the modern world and the subconscious, but I wonder if the concept of the game is ill-conceived: the game is less a cozy escape if it’s reminding me about a soul-crushing office job, endlessly swiping on Tinder, and burning memories of the past.
I love the way Melatonin’s finale synthesizes all of the levels that came before. As each of the stages flashed by in anticipation of what was to come, I doubted I could remember the minigames as far back as the first and second nights on the fly. Then the melody kicked in, and it all came back to me as muscle memory.