Tonal Recall Review
Nope, it’s not a game based on Total Recall universe, it’s a musical memory game.
Remember the old games for Windows where you had to mix and match to pictures? Well here you have to mix and match musical notes, instrument sounds, classical music, drum beats and synthesizer sounds! That’s the premise in Tonal Recall, an iOS mix and math music game. There are two modes, Practice where well, you practice and the Tonal Recall mode where you progress from an easy 4 notes level to a crazy level with 42 notes. The first levels can be fun and evoke or recall the nostalgia you might have of these types of games when they were very popular back then. But the more you progress the more difficult and frustrating becomes resulting in closing the app.
The developer tries to sell the game as a memory training game and quoting “This game exercises the areas of the brain where specific memories are stored”. Maybe, I don’t know, but then again how can you create a memory of a sounds if you don’t know what the sound is? Is it a Si, La, Sol, something? You don’t get that information. There is a leaderboard type of thing, where four players can keep track of their scores, but whatever.
The visual presentation is very lacking to put it in simple words. It looks very outdated and ugly by today’s standarts. Also the UI is like something pulled from a 90’s game, very uninspiring. Another thing that I found very annoying is the moving background. The laser grid thing in the background moves, like really fast and it hurts your eyes. Also the color palette is outdated. Maybe it was supposed to be like that, again to recall the nostalgia of old game, but it doesn’t work here. What this game does great is in the sound department. Everything, every bit of sound being that a musical note, drum beat or synthesizer sound, all of them sound really really great.
So if it was free, then I would recommend this game for that nostalgic feel I was talking about and for making some cool noises, but paying 2$? Nah, it’s way too much to ask, it’s a very difficult sell for the developer and I don’t understand why he went down this path.