Keylocker review

It’s Saturn, in the future. Music is outlawed. Society is run by tyrannical Satellites that keep the good citizens silent and subjugated, unable to produce their own Electricity and beholden to the harsh hands of their overlords. Our protagonist Bobo is an illegal, super glamorous, super cool musician, constantly on the wrong side of the law because of her insistence on making music. She's in just the right spot to upend the natural order of things and put the Satellites in their place, freeing the masses by playing a sick guitar solo at key moments. Sure, she's got a grand plan—the Keylockers scattered around Soundwave City contain trapped djinn (and also the city's music or sound or both?) and if Bobo can free the djinn she will also have Released Music and Defeated Fascism, or something.

What is it? Defeating authoritarianism with music on cyber-Saturn
Release date September 18, 2024
Expect to pay $20
Developer Moonana
Publisher Serenity Forge
Reviewed on Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer No
Steam Deck Yes
Link Steam 

None of that matters very much, because Keylocker is mostly a game about playing a sick guitar solo. Violently. Versus basically every other character you interact with. The revolution will only succeed once Bobo has beaten the shit out of the entire populace of Saturn with her sick guitar.

The combat is primarily turn-based, with some «rhythm» game elements that never prove to be very rhythmic. Most of combat is balancing Bobo's Life Points and Electricity Points, figuring out how best to chip away at enemies' health without giving them space to use moves that might heal, power up, or protect themselves. I chose the Juggernaut class, a fairly simple tank-style character, so much of my combat involved swapping between EP-charging moves and heavy hits, which can make a dent in all but the most annoying of enemies. Occasionally Bobo is joined by Rocket, a Jukebot she found in a scrapyard, or her brother Dealer, who