EbiTapes is a quirky adventure with light music production elements about a frog trying to save a festival and a town’s joy.
Music is the one thing I cannot live without. If I’m having a bad day, or if life proves too stressful, listening to either Rage Against The Machine or Claude Debussy will rebalance my mood like magic. It is no surprise then, that it has always been a part of me. When I lived in Dublin over ten years ago, I took DJing classes, and the first day, by mistake, I entered a music production class instead. Because a person missed the class, I was mistaken for them and took it instead. This fortuitious event fundamentally changed the way I see the world. EbiTapes takes a similar approach, fusing beginner music production with a heartfelt story about a frog’s passion for music.
Find Joy Again
Ebi is a happy anthropomorphic frog that is overworked and underpaid (me too, Ebi) but lives his days dreaming of his town’s annual music festival. Relaxing in his room after work, his doomscrolling is rudely interrupted by the news that his one event he looks forward to every year is now suddenly cancelled.
Desperate about the whole situation, by chance he finds a tape recorder that lets him capture the sounds of his environment to create music. Because everyone in this world is mostly against music and happiness, Ebi takes it upon himself to save the festival and bring back joy into people’s lives.
EbiTapes is a charming musical adventure that takes you through five different “levels” in which Ebi will meet all sorts of peculiar folks. Every quest is related to music in some way. Finding how exactly how shows the inventive ways it will induce a chuckle or two.
For instance, a man called the Shushinator sucks any type of sound with a machine, and your goal is to move him out of the way to sample new sounds. In other cases, people who have lost their spark only regain it after you play a “concert” for them. This is where the game’s main mechanic makes an appearance.
Listen To The World Around You
Consisting of finding sounds to record and playing them freely on a loop, EbiTapes calls this gameplay feature a concert. At first sampling the monotonous sounds of your coworkers making a rhythm, pairing it with the bubbling of the watercooler or the meowing of your cat will make the first semblance of music.
Putting it all together to make a beat is quite exciting, and bopping your head once the various sounds fit feels special. There are plenty of sounds to discover in each of the areas Ebi explores, and bringing joy in the process makes this an invariably cheerful journey. Perhaps, it could even cause players’ interest towards music production.
Adding a bit of complexity to the formula, while the usual quests ask you to explore scouring for new sounds, they’ll need to be mixed and matched as the audience requires. From the humming of cicadas to an alarm clock’s buzzing, every sound is available on your repertoire depending on their length. Shorter sounds are yellow, whereas longer beats that set the mood are blue. Placing each sample correctly during a concert will make the audience cheer for their love for music.
Art Is Life
Looking at it from a first glance, EbiTapes’ art style is surely one of the things that will grab people’s attention. From my perspective, it does look like children’s drawings. But the more I played it, the more I realized this was obviously by design. The quirky yet somewhat realistic situations he finds himself in reflect Ebi’s well-intentioned and innocent nature. Sometimes speaking with cows or older people who find him amusing, their hand-drawn designs also spark fun.
Ebi is a young character who is not happy with the way things are in the world but still surrounds himself with the things he loves. Not only that, but he tries his best to spread this decidedly starry-eyed joy with others. In a world lacking a moment to connect with each other to remind themselves why we are living in the first place—to celebrate together—Ebi is a breath of fresh air.
Conclusion: EbiTapes
I performed as a DJ for over five years of my life. If there is anything that I remember clearly, is glancing over at the people dancing, laughing, and losing themselves in the moment. Some of them would even thank me after. That is the power of music. Even when we may feel the weight of the world in our shoulders, uplifting melodies may just temper our soul. EbiTapes is a kind story about one frog’s quest to save music by recording natural sounds, but it’s so much more than that. Either by its unique art style or silly situations, it reminds us that everything will work out in the end. We just need a bit of rhythm in our lives.
