Indie Game Spotlight – Norwegian Wood

I haven’t got a full intro ready for this new and hopefully weekly feature. Indie Game Spotlight is planned at the moment to be every Friday to highlight and inform you, the readers, about an independently developed game. That is a game not funded, designed, developed or otherwise made by a large studio, or in some cases, a studio of any kind. This is a little late due to sever problems and we didn’t have access for a while. Anyway, on with the inaugural edition.

In the wake of The Beatles: Rock Band coming out a few weeks ago, No Fun Games Studio created a very different sort of rhythm game. Norwegian Wood, named after the early Beatles song of the same name, it is less a game about following the music of a game, but avoiding it.

It is a simple game, with only one song, which due to licencing regulations you have to supply the mp3 for yourself. You don’t need the music and can play it in silence, but it is a bit dull to do so. There are four instruments in the corner of the screen that when that instrument is played it launches a spray of notes for each time a string is plucked. You play as the disembodied head of the late John Lennon controlled with the arrow keys as you try to avoid all the flying notes. You rack up points for not getting hit and after some time you gain multipliers. Should you be hit you lose the multipliers and 100 points per hit. There is an online scoreboard and frankly I don’t know how some of these people got such scores.

It’s simple, it’s fun and each try wont take any longer than the song that inspired it. Quick warning, it is incredibly addictive. My top 30 score has since been erased from the leaderboards. Give it a go.

You can download the game and check the high scores here: http://norwegianwood.gangles.ca/