What do you get if you smash together the adorable cartoon art of Puyo Puyo Tetris with the musical gameplay of Rhythm Heaven and Melatonin? Apparently you get, and I've already sunk entirely too much time into its demo.
There are currently five stages to try—four story-related ones, and a bonus stage for completing the demo—each one offering something a little different. The first stage has you pressing arrow keys to shake a water bottle in a certain direction, while the others take a super simple approach of only needing to hit one key to the rhythm.
One stage has me spiking a volleyball to the beat, while another has me hopping along rainy pavement while trying to catch me out with some surprisingly quick timing. The final stage of the demo is by far my favourite though, making me switch between a very simple rhythm and a more complex one, each time bridging the two melodies with rapid strums of my guitar.
As is to be expected, each level comes with a short tutorial first to help me feel out the rhythm of each stage and when I should be hitting each note. That came particularly handy for the final stage which is the least intuitive of the bunch, but a few attempts at each rhythm had me grasping it far better and meant I wasn't diving head-first into the level without a clue what I was doing.
I found some of the judgement timing to be surprisingly tricky, too. I was able to fully perfect the volleyball stage with no effort, but I [[link]] found myself having to repeatedly retry both the water bottle shaking and the final big band moment.
I'm always a fan of rhythm games that offer a simple premise while letting absolute music game demons like myself up the challenge by perfecting my note timing, which makes me extra pleased that Pastel Parade even tells me how late or early I am on each note hit. It's something surprisingly lacking in some other rhythm games, and is always a setting I'm hunting for otherwise.
There's even a story, though the demo is very light on the details. I'm sure it's going to be about friendship, and music, and all that cutesy stuff that these games are typically hammering home. I'm not usually super keen on a narrative-heavy rhythm game, but each cutscene in the demo was short and sweet enough that I didn't feel like I was waiting too long to get back into the action.
Pastel Parade promises 30 original songs when the full game releases on August 27. Each stage only [[link]] clocks in at about a minute or so long, so there's not exactly infinite replayability here. But for a short and sweet experience filled with poppy tunes and adorable chibi characters, Pastel Parade already feels worth picking up based on its five demo stages alone.