Garden of Coloured Lights

4 Rezzish
Garden of Colored Lights is one of the most profoundly satisfying vertical-scrolling shmups I’ve played in ages. Part of this is the fact that the game actually has a difficulty curve other than “The screen is full of bullets and you are dead.” Part of it is the varied ship weapons you can monkey around with until you have a loadout that works perfectly for your gameplay style.

Most of it is the music.

Garden of Coloured Lights has a music system reminiscent of Rez, where everything that happens on screen creates a beat, note, or other bit of sound effect. The effect could be cheesy if done poorly, but thankfully that’s not the case. This procedurally generated soundtrack is actually quite pleasing to the ear, to the point where I actually considered whether setting up a copy of GoCL and a second PC with my favored sound editing software and a library of Phat Beetz would be enough to become a techno-trance DJ. Okay, no, it wouldn’t. But I wondered for a minute. My one gripe about the sound is that while everything on screen does have a sound, your own guns barely register on that meter. Maybe they were afraid that it would drown out the sounds created by your enemies, I’m not sure, but something about that doesn’t seem quite right.

The graphics are the simple, iconic vectorish sort that you can see in Warning Forever and in countless other abstract shmups nowadays. They’re clean, simple, and get the job done, but they seem to fit in more cleanly with the aesthetic of GoCL, perhaps simply because of the innately abstract nature of the soundtrack and gameplay.

Garden of Coloured Lights rates a solid 4/5 in my book. It’s fun, it’s a little trippy, and it’s only two and a half megs to download.