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It’s quite a statement for a game to feature more difficulty levels than actual levels. A City Sleeps, a musically-charged twin-stick bullet hell shooter, makes the point that it is far less interested in providing length and variety than it is in offering a brief, finely-honed, and ruthlessly difficult gameplay experience.
The plot of the game is rather sketchily laid out in brief expository paragraphs. In summary, the main character, Poe, is a Dream Exorcist: someone who travels into people’s dreams and battles monsters, known as Kami, which cause them to have nightmares. This sets up the game’s three levels (and five difficulty settings) in which Poe flies through visually and sonically vibrant dreams, avoiding a haze of projectiles while firing back at hordes of enemies. The gameplay is made somewhat more complex by the use of Ghosts (turrets which harm enemies or benefit Poe) and Relics (which boost Poe’s abilities) but for the most part the gameplay consists of simple dodging and shooting.
The game may appear to be a major departure for Harmonix, a studio best known for the Rock Band series and until now exclusively the creators of rhythm games, yet A City Sleeps is closer to these earlier titles than one might initially expect. Like rhythm games, which test the player’s ability to quickly react to complex patterns, A City Sleeps is at heart a game of rhythmic response. While to strangers of the “bullet hell” genre the game might initially appear to be complete chaos, the particles, projectiles, and enemies which fill the screen are in fact an intricate layering of patterns. Adjusting to this underlying order, and becoming practised in weaving in and out of it, is the central skill that is tested by bullet hell shooters. In this way the bullet hell genre and rhythm-based games are not so different, a similarity which is deepened by the role of music in A City Sleeps. While certain backing tracks and vocal lines exist completely separate from the gameplay, many of the soundtrack’s rhythms and beats are projected by Poe and the Kami’s weapons firing. Poe’s main gun unleashes a steady drumbeat, and the individual enemies produce their own sounds – smaller ones generating simpler tunes and bosses unleashing massive waves of cacophonic noise. In this way the gameplay comes to reflect and occasionally change the flow of the music. As the music intensifies or calms down the pace of gameplay is directly affected while, in reverse, the elimination of particular enemies and the usage of Poe’s primary weapon or Ghosts remove and add rhythms and melodies, creating a gameplay experience which is deeply connected to sound. As standard rhythm games slip further away into obscurity, A City Sleeps offers a bold fusion through which they can be kept alive.
However, while conceptually strong, A City Sleeps fails to satisfy as a complete game. Its three levels offer a paltry amount of content, and the intense difficulty curve prevents some from accessing even that. Some of the relics and Ghosts, the only aspects of the game which allow some strategic complexity, are only accessible after beating each level on every difficulty, at which point there is nothing left to do but retry those levels for higher scores. While that may function as a time-dump for hardcore fans of the genre, it does not supplement the need for an actual sense of progression. In spite of the sharply rising difficulty, by the end the player is not facing the excitement of a new challenge, but instead is simply going over a well-trodden path yet again. A City Sleeps offers a few hours of exceptionally well-crafted gameplay, and a couple more hours for those dedicated enough to see it to the finish, but is altogether far too limited to offer a fulfilling gameplay experience.
