Keylocker Review

It’s Saturn, in the future. Music is outlawed. The society is ruled by tyrannical Satellites who keep the good citizens quiet and subservient, unable to produce their own Electricity and beholden to the harsh hands of their rulers. Our heroine Bobo is an illegal, super-glamorous, super-cool musician, constantly on the wrong side of the law due to her insistence on making music. She’s in the perfect position to change the natural order of things and put the Satellites in their place, freeing the masses by playing ailing guitar solos at key moments. Sure, she’s got a grand plan – Keylockers scattered around Soundwave City contain imprisoned genies (and the city’s music, sound, or both?) and if Bobo can free the genies, she’ll also have Unleashed Music and Defeated Fascism, or something like that.

None of that really matters, because Keylocker is mostly a game about playing a ailing guitar solo. Brutally. Against pretty much every other character you interact with. The revolution only succeeds when Bobo obliterates the entire population of Saturn with his ailing guitar.

Combat is mostly turn-based, with some “rhythm” elements that never feel very rhythmic. Much of the combat involves balancing Bobo’s health and electricity points, figuring out how best to whittle down enemies’ health without giving them any room to apply moves that could heal, buff, or protect them. I chose the Juggernaut class, a fairly straightforward tank-style character, so most of my fights involved switching between EP-charging moves and massive blows that can put a dent in all but the most annoying of enemies. Bobo is occasionally joined by Rocket, a Jukebot she found in a junkyard, or her brother Dealer, a hacker with a TV for a helmet—their skill sets can add variety to Bobo’s tactics in more elaborate battles, though I found that each character tended to have a skill that was more useful than the others.

Most abilities are activated by pressing a button at a specific time, either in a compact sequence or once when the character flashes white, and if you time it right you can dance most of the fights in the game away because you don’t take damage from perfect dodges and you deal a fair amount of damage to your enemies with a perfect strike. Unlike games that do this type of system well, like Nintendo’s Mario RPG, the whole mechanic tends to land on the wrong side of fickle, requiring you to react almost before the meter has actually been triggered.

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Frustratingly often I’d have to replay minor fights three or four times because of what seemed like bad luck, a pixel in the wrong direction eating up the last bit of my LP when I swore my timing wasn’t a second off from the previous perfect dodge. Thankfully, all battles can be restarted from scratch, rather than having to load a save after each death—otherwise, the amount of replaying steps would be truly unbearable.

This repetitive combat annoyance would be mitigated if the battles actually felt crucial. Instead, every area in the game is saturated with encounters that draw from the same geographically defined list of enemies, none of which are individually problematic, but when encountered in such rapid succession, they become almost painful. The worst are the completely pointless and incredibly numerous encounters with the clerics, triggered by the irregular searchlight drones that love to hover over larger areas of the map, forcing you to randomly run around them to avoid combat. They’ll often get stuck hovering over Bobo while she interacts with objects, enters conversations, or uses vending machines, leaving you with no choice but to enter another mind-numbingly uninteresting series of inconsequential altercations with Saturn-headed cops and their litany of lesser cronies. What’s more, the drones have a terrible habit of triggering Again right out of combat, their hovering pattern slams them back into me before I can even move. This could be representative of Saturn’s surveillance, the watchful eye the Satellites keep on their subjects, but in practice it’s just a huge pain in the ass.

Unfortunately, that sentiment is echoed throughout much of the game. Hour after hour, Keylocker actively sabotaged itself. The stylish art, witty writing, and jovial, offbeat humor were difficult to enjoy when the world was difficult to navigate, the systems were convoluted and confusing, and the combat—the game’s main focus!—just wasn’t fun.

I became incredibly wealthy with in-game currency, and spent it almost exclusively on basic healing milkshakes, collecting key after key that I invested into Bobo’s skill tree at basically random because I couldn’t understand why I should bother with fractional micro-adjustments to the dozen or so effects on my Status page when I knew I’d just load up and hit the guy with my axe every battle. The amount of text in the weapon and effects menu seemed a bit ridiculous, especially compared to the quest screen, which updates so infrequently and gives so little information that I wonder why it was even included.

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Wherever I went, I got monologues of lore about the world—which was very enjoyable, suffused with Paradise Killer-style irreverence and punctuated by Bobo’s cheerful, misanthropic responses—but the whole story is a lost medium the moment you hear it for the first time. It became absurd how much information I was given in conversations or cutscenes that seemed crucial but that I was never allowed to access again. Why would I want to check the name of a Satellite I was about to kill or a Djinn I’d already freed when I could instead look at a Friends page that hadn’t been updated since the tutorial, or slightly illegible numbers next to a list of stats I’d never used?

It’s a shame, because beyond the frustration, there are many reasons why Keylocker is actually a game to love. The occasional boss fights are actually a welcome break from the tedious grind of combat — it’s refreshing to finally have to apply tactics, planning, and watch your characters to get through a multi-enemy robot fight club or to disrupt the Orbital Resonance between Satellites that prevents them from being damaged. The mini-games scattered around the area, like a cheeky Guitar Hero knockoff or an arcade-style hacking sequence, are a nice break from the rest of the routine, though a few of them also tend to be a bit detailed. The colorful cyberpunk world looks great, the characters are cheeky and diverse, and the writing is lightheartedly fun without ever taking itself too seriously.

Beneath the fun, there’s also a hint of a much more sobering story: I was particularly moved by the relationship between Bobo and Dealer, who try to protect each other and balance their opposing approaches to Bobo’s revolution. It’s clear that a lot of care and enthusiasm has gone into the Keylocker universe; it’s a shame that the mechanics around it make it so difficult to appreciate.

By the end of the game I understood Bobo’s anarchism. Her jovial violence, her rudeness and happiness, her desire to solve everything with music that might be murder – the system is rotten, Bobo, you’re right. The structure that holds this place together makes no sense! There’s a better future somewhere beneath the filth, and there’s probably a better game beneath the Keylocker.