Before I start raving about why you need to play this game, let me mention the very few things I don’t like about it
• Lives Feature (Though this is somewhat understandable, considering it’s a free game)
• The dialogue can sound a little off at times (though again, understandable since English isn’t the first language of the creators)
Now that that’s out of the way, play this. Oh my god play this! This is one of the single best games I’ve ever played, and I don’t even like runners or rhythm games. I can break down why I love it so much into 3 points, in order of least to most importance (at least for me). The Art, The Music, and The Story. I’ll have a spoiler warning before I get into the spoilers, because trust me, this is a game you want to play unspoiled.
Lost in Harmony is a beautiful game, in more ways than one. The art and more specifically the landscapes are something to behold. The landscape shot you get after each level provides you with not only an entrancing view, but a sneak peak of what to expect in the next level. The one last facet of the art I love, is the game’s use of pure visual storytelling, but I’ll get to that.
The music in Lost in Harmony is utterly phenomenal. From the remixes of Swan Lake and the New World Symphony, to original songs such as Lost in Space, Lost in Infinity (The two best instrumental tracks in the game may I add), to the original, massively underrated Lost in Time featuring Wyclef Jean. The music is used to convey so many different emotions in this game: happiness, relief, excitement, fear, sorrow, and emptiness.
Finally, we have the story. Where do I even begin? Lost in Harmony tells a story of a figurative battle between love and disease. Between growth and decay. Between Aya, Kaito, and Cancer. Despite the scarceness of voice acting, the game manages to deliver its story in a unique, incredibly effective way. I hope by now I’ve convinced you to play this game. But if that’s not why you’re here, if you’ve already played, and are deciding what rating to give it, let me tell you what makes Lost in Harmony a true 5 star classic.
!!!Spoilers Ahead!!!
This game is heartbreaking. There’s no easy way to put it, it’s an incredibly painful ending, with barely a silver lining to comfort you, and that’s what makes it brilliant. As I mentioned before, the use of visual storytelling in this game is superb. At the end of each level, Kaito and Aya come upon a horizon, showing the setting of the next level. Aya reaches out to touch the brightest star in the sky as the screen goes white and the dream comes to a close. However, at the end of Dream 12, which takes place in space, representative of Aya’s childhood desire to become a star, when the story reaches it’s climax, something different happens. They’ve reached the star Aya has been reaching for at the end of each level, and so Aya takes a step, looks back at Kaito one last time, before turning to walk into the star as the screen fades to white. This coincides with Kaito then waking up to text Aya, only to be met with a message by her mother. Aya is dead, Kaito did all he could, but it wasn’t enough. That’s what separates Lost in Harmony from so many other games. In most games, even if the ending is sad, you win in some form in the end. Not this time. You, Kaito loses, and then there’s two more, postmortem levels to really hammer that home. The music in all 3 of these levels is on point, the suspenseful, fearful tone in the beginning of Dream 12, followed by an intense piece, before the sadness of Lost in Infinity sets in, and you realize that you’re playing the last level where Kaito and Aya are going to be together. Dream 13 is a representation of Kaito’s grief, trapped in a dark, relentless void accompanied by an intense, heart-wrenching remix of Sarabande, and my favorite addition to that level, his screams for Aya. This is before the second half of the level, an icy wasteland, representative of the emptiness he feels after the pain begins to subside, the slow melody of Alhambra playing in the background. Dream 14’s use of the song Your Presence, in the same landscape as the conversely joyous level 5, representing how Kaito and Aya’s presences comforted one another in different ways is the corrosive acid coated cherry on top. Am I rambling at this point? Absolutely. But I had some free time and felt like writing this. So please, give this game the rating it deserves.