No Straight Roads wants to be a musical. It is a rhythm game, an action-adventure, a boss rush and a Saturday-morning cartoon, and it wears all four at once without ever quite deciding which one should lead. Metronomik’s debut, released August 25, 2020 for PlayStation 4, PC, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, is one of the strangest big-hearted swings of its year. It is also, for long stretches, a fight against its own controls.
Trailer, via Metronomik.
Bunk Bed Junction Takes Vinyl City
The setup is pure rock-opera spite. Hot-headed Mayday and cool-as-ice Zuke make up the indie rock duo Bunk Bed Junction. They audition for the record label No Straight Roads, get dismissed in favor of EDM, and watch Tatiana, the label’s CEO and Vinyl City’s prime charter, ban rock from future auditions. Then the power goes out, and the backup energy flows only to NSR’s elites. So the duo hijacks concerts to take the city back, district by district.
Vinyl City is the music capital of the world, powered by a technology called “Qwasa” that turns music into energy. Each district is run by an NSR artist holding a Platinum Disc. That structure gives the game its shape and its best ideas.
Mayday’s Guitar, Zuke’s Drumsticks
You pick Mayday or Zuke and switch anytime in single player. Mayday’s guitar swings and attack transformations hit harder. Zuke builds combos with his drumsticks and supports with his transformations. Notes you collect become ammunition and projectiles. Objects in boss arenas turn into weapons and defenses.
The combat asks you to listen. You move freely, off the beat, but you read audio cues to know when enemies strike and when to answer. A skill tree grows with your fan count, offering shared upgrades or new moves as Bunk Bed Junction’s popularity rises.
That is a fine pitch. In practice the rhythm layer and the action layer argue with each other. The music tells you one thing; the hitboxes tell you another. Boss fights that should feel like duets feel like wrestling a metronome.
From DJ Subatomic Supernova to DK West
The roster is the reason to keep playing. Tatiana leads NSR, voiced by Priscilla Patrick. Her artists include DJ Subatomic Supernova, an egotistical space-themed DJ voiced by Mohamad “Uncle Ali” Imran; Sayu, a bubbly virtual mermaid pop idol voiced by Nikki Simmons; Yinu, a piano-playing child prodigy called “the Golden Maestro of Vinyl City,” voiced by Damia Huda; 1010, a robotic navy-based boy band voiced by Muhammad Zulhilmi; and Eve, an illusion-casting diva voiced by Joanna Bessey.
Mayday is voiced by Su Ling Chan, Zuke by Steven Bones. Zulhilmi also plays Neon J., 1010’s cyborg manager and creator, a war veteran. Alfred Loh plays DK West, a shadow-manipulating rapper who serves as the game’s superboss. His fights demand you control Mayday and Zuke at the same time, and they are punishing. Only the first encounter is required; after Yinu falls, you can return for his second and third battles.
Ranking the boss lineup by how well the gimmick survives the combat:
- Eve — the illusion-casting diva, the one fight where the visual trickery and the mechanics agree.
- Yinu — the child prodigy, a clean and readable set piece.
- Sayu — the virtual mermaid idol, charming, slightly overlong.
- DJ Subatomic Supernova — big personality, clumsy space.
- 1010 — the robotic boy band, a novelty that wears thin.
- DK West — brilliant in concept, brutal in execution.
What Metronomik Got Right
The art style, the story, the themes and the music drew praise, and they earn it. Vinyl City is a real place with a real argument inside it: who gets to decide what a city listens to. Wan Hazmer, a lead designer on Final Fantasy XV, and Daim Dziauddin, a concept artist on Street Fighter V, built something with a point of view about corporate control of culture, and they built it in Malaysia, independent, over three years.
The criticism that landed hardest was about the gameplay — inconsistent, overly complicated, unsure of its own rules. That criticism is correct. The game’s ambition outruns its tuning.
An updated version, No Straight Roads: Encore Edition, arrived October 21, 2021. A sequel, No Straight Roads 2, is set for Windows and consoles in 2026.
Here is the thing worth saying plainly. No Straight Roads is not a great action game and not a great rhythm game, and it is more memorable than either. Its world, its cast and its nerve carry what its combat cannot. Metronomik made a game about a scrappy independent outfit fighting an empire that controls the airwaves, and then shipped it as a scrappy independent outfit. That is not a marketing line. It is the actual texture of the thing, and it is why the flaws read as growing pains rather than cynicism.
The sequel has a real chance to fix the one system that never worked. If it does, everything else here is already built.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
