
I want to see something beautiful. Enter stage left Something Beautiful, a “music-driven” point-and-click adventure game that has the vibe of a cursed CD-ROM you find in your parents storage unit where you look for answers in a strange, surreal, unsettling world filled with fleshy, anthropomorphic puzzles.
Something Beautiful comes from artist and musician Murlo, whose auditory stylings range from alien bar lounge to PS1 platformer you’ve never heard of in vibe. It is, as far as I can tell, their first game, and truthfully it’s a struggle to truly capture, or explain, this game in words alone (in part because the game’s Steam page is light on concrete details). The game opens with you, a fairly regular looking guy, waking up in a “socially fractured industrial estate,” where there do appear to be other regular looking guys, as well as puzzles made up of humanoid creatures that look like God’s initial attempt at making us.
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These creatures themselves in part appear to be the puzzles you will try to solve. One type of puzzle appears to show pucks emanating from the body of one of these humanoids, with you having to stamp them down at the right time. Another shows parts of a leg glowing. I don’t know what you’re meant to do with this one. Other sections of the game see you looking at books that even appear to directly reference Murlo’s own discography. I think you can even play a man at some points. It is a disorienting game to look at, but I am quite enamoured by it for as little as can be seen of it.
Murlo even promises the embedding of a whole album within the game world itself, “from interactive music puzzles to surreal ‘Flesh Disk’ jukeboxes.” Nightmarish, certainly, Lynchian, most definitely. No release date attached to Something Beautiful as it stands, but you can wishlist it on Steam while you wait for one.









