An interesting collection of chiptune albums mixed with some lite retro gaming
Before this review I’d never heard of RIKI, even though they’re an established creator, illustrator and producer, so I didn’t know what to expect going in. Would it be a game? An art piece? A music album? It’s actually all of these. In fact, it’s barely functionally a video game.
RIKI 8bit Game Collection is designed to be a semi-interactive chiptune album. It’s kind of like back in the day when we used to put a CD into a PC and it might have had a music video hidden on it; it has that kind of charm to it. It incorporates three albums that have neat little things that you can kind of poke around with, and two small games that are a little like Game & Watch or Wario Ware experiences. They’re cute, but there’s not a lot of meat on the bones. They themselves are also just albums that sort of move along as we’re playing. One game has us jumping around and collecting things, and the other is an interesting scrolling shooter concept that has us balancing our firepower.
But that depth is kind of not important because it really is focused on the 8bit chiptune music and pixel art. What’s interesting about this is that RIKI is the manga artist, with some really nice designs, and the soundtrack is by 40-plus chiptune and gaming composers. These are folk that have worked on ActRaiser, Ape Escape, Final Fantasy X and Revenge of Shinobi. It’s like it’s very good, very “listenable” music.
RIKI 8bit Game Collection is designed to be their music album release, and really is a neat way of releasing an album. It’s solid, unique, and full of great music. It’s not something we usually see making its way into any video game storefronts, but for fans of the genre of music it’s highly enjoyable.
This review is based on a Nintendo Switch eShop code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live for January 12, 2025.
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