Jackbox Games has shared an exclusive look at Jackbox Party Pack 10‘s Dodo Re Mi game, which will turn gamers’ phones into instruments and task them with playing well to avoid being eaten.
In Dodo Re Mi, players use their phones to hit a song’s notes as they fall into place on a Guitar Hero-style screen. Once the song ends, it’s played back with everyone’s chosen instruments included – and if someone’s missed too many notes, they’re eaten by Dodo Re Mi’s hungry plant.
Speaking to NME, Dodo Re Mi audio lead Nate Sandberg shared that the game will feature a “plethora of playable public domain songs with well-known melodies and harmonies”.
“Each of these songs has been ‘style shifted’ to sound surprisingly new,” they shared. “We’ve got a metal version of ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, a funk version of ‘Habañera’, and I won’t give away the style for ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’, but you definitely haven’t heard it like this!”
You can watch Dodo Re Mi in action below, along with the game’s developers explaining the “borderline torture” behind its creation.
As you can see in the above video, matches of Dodo Re Mi can get hectic. Sandberg explained that although Jackbox tries to “keep chaos in the gameplay and out of the development cycle,” it created Dodo Re Mi with “a lot of unknowns”.
“Some of our early meetings had strong chaotic creative energy because everyone on the team was pitching wild ideas, trying to figure out what this game would be,” they explained.
“One of my chaotic ideas was to put a song in the game called ‘0’ 33’ that would just be 33 seconds of silence, referencing the groundbreaking piece ‘4’ 33’ by John Cage,” Sandberg continued. “If you play any sound, you get eaten by the plant. [Game director Brooke Breit] kindly mentioned that most people wouldn’t get my obscure music history reference and everyone would think our game was broken. She was right.”
Dodo Re Mi will launch as part of Jackbox Party Pack 10, which is set to release this October.