Sometimes you see free games while browsing Steam or GOG and your curiosity is every bit as piqued as your sense of parsimony. Symphonia, especially, intrigued me by its screenshots: this was an Indie platformer with a strikingly vivid artstyle of flowing contours and detailed backdrops, with an elaborate orchestral score; visually and aurally it's easily the match of a professional video game like Rayman Origins or Hollow Knight. Not only was it relatively new, but it was free on GOG (and Itch, I'd later discover) and would apparently stay that way in perpetuity. Was it a game that ran into music licensing issues and could only be given away? Was it so abjectly terrible despite appearances that the developers didn't feel right asking for money? Was it some kind of charity affair where the developers were instead asking for voluntary donations to save some opera house from closure? Is it mafia-related? (I've seen The Godfather, I'm sure there was classical music in there somewhere.) Or maybe it was an unusually high-quality student project that's less than an hour long and given away gratis as a means to generate interest in more substantial projects (including perhaps a fully-featured version of Symphonia) from the same studio in the future? If the latter sounds the most correct, it's probably because it is in fact the most correct.

Symphonia presents a land of music and clockwork machinery, the latter of which has ceased to function causing the many music-making devices around the place to go silent. Philemon, a concert violinist and dextrous hero, determines the problem to lie somewhere in the core of Symphonia's mechanical world and singlehandedly travels there to restart its engines. He then returns the same way he entered - though with more hazards to overcome with the machines now functional - to finish the concerto he originally set out to perform. The entire exercise takes about thirty minutes, give or take a roadblock, and the player is able to resume the game at any of three checkpoints when starting anew. While music plays a significant role in the world design there aren't too many mechanics tied to it, excepting certain moments where Philemon has to power machines with his violin music to put them in motion including moving platforms and gates. Fortunately, there's no accompanying game of Simon or anything, though I could see a rhythm mini-game being implemented in the "final" product.

From what I can tell Sunny Peak, the student studio that launched Symphonia, based much of the game's movement and mechanics on a few major Indie platformers known for their fluidity: the two chief mechanics involving the violin saw that Philemon carries with him, along with his violin. Using this flexible bendy saw he can pogo himself over longer gaps (though spikes are always fatal) and make higher jumps, and can also use it on cushioned surfaces to launch himself in the opposing direction held. The game doesn't quite last long enough to use these two mechanics in tandem for more elaborate platforming sequences - the pogoing and fluidity reminded me of Shovel Knight, and in particular its expansion Specter of Torment - but it's certainly something a larger version of the game could explore. The game does still have some challenging sequences towards the end, and there's a game-wide collectible hunt that gives you a post-game rank based on how many you found if you feel like taking on every challenge the game has to offer.

To some extent, Symphonia in its current student project form resembles more of a demo of what a final game might resemble, even if it presently has a beginning, a middle, and an ending in its short, dialogue-free narrative. There's little Sunny Peak could do to improve the core of what's already here, besides perhaps add a few more mechanics and tweak those already there to improve the game's flow even further, and this point it just needs severalfold more levels and concepts for set-pieces to get to where it needs to be. Notably, regarding the protagonist's similar sinuous appearance and movement animations, Symphonia might be the closest we're going to get to Hollow Knight: Silksong until the real thing finally shows up. I'll admit to being a little apprehensive about reviewing a game that took less than a hour to complete but I figured enough people were as intrigued by this freebie as I was to warrant a full investigation; turns out it was worth slaking that curiosity because for as short as it happened to be, Symphonia has an abundance of confidence in its presentation and gameplay. It really only needs a bit more substance to cross the threshold into being commercially viable.

Rating: 4 out of 5.