FRACT OSC - A musical experience

It's been a while since my last blog, again. Haven't got around to making many of these, but since I'll be playing some new games during the Winter Break perhaps those will be some things I can write about. I beat one such game just yesterday, in fact, called FRACT OSC.

OSC as in synthetic oscillator.

FRACT OSC is quite the odd game, I've never played any like it, really. The main gameplay consists of basic exploration an open world through walking around and interesting with some elements of the world which mostly consist of puzzles to solve. The interesting aspect of the game is its heavy emphasis on music, which works its way into the rest of the world and the puzzles.

Don't think the puzzles will be easy

As the game starts off you have a little tutorial level which, without words, explains how the mechanics work and how you can interact with the world, but once you do some basic operations like wriggling the mouse in circles or from left to right, you open up the main world and... Well, the rest is up to you. The game doesn't tell you where to go or what to do, it has no dialogue at all in fact, but leaves you to find it out by exploring it for yourself and picking up on environmental clues as to what's going on.

Oh no, someone forgot to turn on the... Thing. Yes.

The world starts off mostly devoid of colour or music, but as you explore the three worlds, each themed around a different part of a synthesizer with appropriately differentiated colour schemes and environmental patterns you find all sorts of abstract objects that emit sounds and music which guide you towards large structures where you have to solve musically-themed puzzles. The interesting part in these puzzles is how the puzzle pieces correspond to the music and their placement and configuration change the music. You're effectively making the music along with solving the puzzle rather than solving a puzzle towards an already solved piece of music.

Can't turn the platform without tuning the music as well

These puzzles take various forms and each of the three worlds have their own puzzles, half of which require you to interact with the puzzle space itself, placing blocks, turning valves or rotating platforms while the other half have you create the appropriate sequence that finally solves the puzzle. The brilliant part of these sequences are that there's not just one correct sequence, there can be a multitude of correct sequences which means that your solutions change how the music in the game sounds and you've got a certain control over the gameworld.

This is not how I remember my solution.

In the end it all comes together in a very satisfying way, as you solve more puzzles and move from world to world and unlock more quick travel/save points the world slowly starts to become and feel more lively as more and more areas start playing music. It comes together especially nicely in later puzzles which combine parts of old puzzles and use the sequences you made yourself. The game does suffer a bit from the lack of direction at some point where it can be a pain to find the next destination or it requires you to properly sequence your sequences together which requires you to have noticed some objects light up when you inspect them closely to give hints as to how to tune your sequence, but these hobbles do make your eventual successes feel more satisfying.

Nothing screams satisfying quite like beams of light.

Another notable part of the game is the in-depth synthesizer features you unlock by progressing through the game. There's tons of functions and by the end of the game you can easily make a 3-minute long song if you have the patience to fiddle around with the settings and sequences you can add. I know I had my fair share of fun making a track of my own with bizarre results. If you want the files just bug me about it and I'll see if I can send them to you, the game has a function to upload the files to youtube or expert them as .wav files but I only got the latter to work, somehow it just didn't link to my YT profile.

It gets pretty complex.

Anyway, it's definitely a game worth checking out if it sounds interesting! Perhaps during the upcoming winter sales you could see if it's discounted.