Wandersong: a tale of music and heroes

Yesterday, now that my exam is done, I finished Wandersong, which I got in one of the charity bundles for Ukraine. I enjoyed it a lot. I almost stopped playing early in act 3 because neither gameplay – you use music to interact with things – nor story were that interesting yet and I'm sick of the romanticized view of pirates (they sell coffee beans! Gotta call them pirates because that's cool, I guess?) But then the end of act 3 immediately made me much more interested in the story and the characters, and it only got better from there. The gameplay fortunately also got a little more varied. The colors were very nice, the artstyle is not my favorite but it fit well, and I enjoyed the music too, and the themes of what it means to be a hero and how to go on in the face of overwhelming odds etc.
I tried to get as much dialogue as I could, and it took me a little under 12 hours to finish the game. There are several blind playthroughs on Youtube of about the same length.

Many more spoilery thoughts under the cut (it got a lot longer than I expected), especially about The Hero. I wrote most of this after I finished the game and then I looked up a few details, and that's when I found out that a) according to Word of God the bard has a semi-canonical name (when asked, the developer suggested "Bard" or "Kiwi") but I don't like that and will be ignoring it, and b) the bard is not canonically gendered and according to the developer is non-binary, any pronoun. For some reason I was convinced that the bard was male, I thought I remembered that someone had referred to the bard as "he" early in the game, and now I'm annoyed at myself because generally I dislike it when people default to male for non-gendered characters like Hollow Knight's knight. But since any pronoun is okay I won't rewrite my notes.

( Spoilers, ft. many thoughts about The Hero )