Sound Shapes review: Bare essentials

In Sound Shapes, developer Queasy Games boils the platform game down to its bare essentials. Your "character" is a tiny ball that can roll, accelerate and jump. It can stick to some surfaces, but anything red will kill it. On each screen, the object is to collect all the floating discs and get to the exit.

Those discs, however, are what put the sound in Sound Shapes. Each represents a musical note so, as you collect them, you're building a musical composition. As you progress through each level, the music gets more intense as the action gets more challenging.

This sort of music-building experiment isn't completely original; the 2010 puzzle game Chime offered similar rewards. But the graphics and music in Sound Shapes blend so smoothly that each of its two dozen levels feels like it's telling a story.

In D-Cade, for example, electronic music phenom deadmau5 collaborates with retro game studio PixelJam on a tribute to the arcade classic Asteroids.

But as lovely as Sound Shapes is, it's disappointingly short: You can zip through its built-in levels in an afternoon. The package also includes a full set of tools to build your own levels.

On Sony's handheld Vita, we were able to whip up a functional, if rudimentary, level in about 10 minutes.

RATING E for Everyone

PLOT Music-building experiment

DETAILS PlayStation 3 Vita, $15

BOTTOM LINE Small gem with huge potential