NoteCaptor

Considering this game as a pedagogical tool, it's genuinely impressive and highly effective. I’ve used it with my music students, and their note acquisition has noticeably improved. This is a clear sign of the game's educational value. Even as a professional musician, I found it surprisingly engaging. Honestly, this could become one of the go-to tools for beginners learning music. Now, for the haters: if you came in expecting this "free" game to rival a AAA title, do yourself a favor and log off. This isn’t "Game of the Year" material, it’s a teaching tool, not Elden Ring. And to those smart people out there complaining, “It doesn’t make a sound when I press a note”, dude … PRESS ... THE ... FREAKIN’ ... ‘S’ ... on the menu to enable the sound, you idiot. If that’s too hard, maybe gaming isn’t your thing. Try silence. You're already good at that.

First one!! And first of all I'd like to say it's a thumbs up even though it was close, which means some important things should be improved, in my opinion. But first things first, visually everything looks good and sweet, the idea of introducing music theory in a playful way is a good one. Of course, it should be mentioned again that the game is free, which is a very positive factor in the rating/feedback here. Nevertheless, I have to ask myself who would actually spend a fiver on the soundtrack as a DLC and actually sit down at home and listen to it. If someone wants to support the developers with it, okay cool, then do it that way, but why not offer a supporter pack as DLC, with the soundtrack, pictures and videos on music theory and examples of tones/sounds, ear training or things like that ;) That would be so cool! I tried out the game yesterday at a workshop with young people and now pay attention dear children ; ) At the beginning everyone was very excited and you could hear them saying how cool is that and stuff. Unfortunately and I was almost expecting this, it went by pretty quickly. After a relatively short time, everyone was a bit annoyed but above all bored. And…

"NoteCaptor" is one of those "I can't believe it's not a mobile app" games slapped together with the godawful blight on gaming that is GameMaker Studio... and just like you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, you can't make a great game with a terrible game engine. This 2D cartoony adventure game is also educational, and will teach you about music notes. Yes, this is not making musical education better, it's just making gaming worse. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs to pretend they're mobile phones or Commodore 64s. This is only free in a rudimentary sense... the developer has their hand out for a $2 USD "donation" for this as you're expected to buy some soundtrack DLC from Steam... digital panhandling. Like the homeless guys who splash dirty water on your windscreen at the traffic lights. No thanks. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 3 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even giv…

I love the idea of a game that teaches about musical notation, but it's just not executed well at all here. NoteCaptor's gameplay is just clicking the letter that corresponds to the note above each enemy. The visuals (in terms of effects, transitions, etc) are barebones and, ironically, the sound design is basically nonexistent. You'd think that clicking a note would [i]play[/i] that note so you can subconsciously associate the sound of each note with its corresponding letter and placement, but no; an NPC even tells you "you'll be able to learn better if you sound out the notes as they show up" like the game knows that it's barely more helpful than just looking at sheet music. Also, there's no pause button, and pressing Escape closes the game for... some reason. You may think "but you only played the game for seven minutes!" Out of curiosity, I looked up NoteCaptor gameplay on YouTube, and none of the videos last longer than eight minutes, like everyone realized "oh... that's all there is to it, huh" at the same time. I wanted to like this, but it's in dire need of some polish.