This musical RPG is doing important work by letting you beat up music snobs, but I really stuck around for the painful (brilliant) puns

I still regularly listen to Styx, so I would never criticise anyone’s musical taste, and thus I feel a certain kinship with People of Note protagonist Cadence. Her stab at pop stardom hinges on her combining different genres and breaking through to the cliquey denizens of her music-themed world—essentially fighting musical snobbery.

People of Note’s demo flung me into the second chapter of the turn-based RPG, as Cadence ventured into the rock city of Durandis on a quest to recruit a musician into her currently non-existent band. But first, lots of breaks to stop and laugh at terrible puns.

This demo contains more awful puns than a PC Gamer writer, but at the top it’s gotta be “accorgion”, which is naturally a corgi spliced with an accordion. It is adorable and squishy and of course you can pet it. If you don’t, you’re a monster.

Also adorable are the hidden owls dotted around the game. Find them and they’ll transform the turn-based battles into simple quizzes. The owls are odd. Weird, even. Weird Owls. Complete with moustache and big hairdo. I hate pop quizzes, but I appreciate a pun.

Along with the owls, the city is full of snooty music fans divided into different subgenres—metal, punk, grunge. They hate each other. And they all especially hate the country fans. They’re not too keen on pop-loving Cadence, either. The town’s a tough nut to crack, then, but Cadence finds a buddy in Fret, an aging rocker, and the two quickly combine forces, fusing their sounds together.

A lot of my favourite videogame soundtracks, and specific tunes, come from RPGs. Final Fantasy 7 and Persona 5 are high up there, and I’ll never tire of Blue Dragon’s boss theme, Eternity, performed by Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, or Raphael’s self-sung boss theme in Baldur’s Gate 3.

People of Note probably isn’t going to reach these heights. The location themes and battle music have already drifted out of my mind, despite only just putting the game down, because while they’re not terrible, they just aren’t memorable.

The exception to this is the rock-pop duet performed by Cadence and Fret when they join up—we’re treated to a cutscene where they’re imagining themselves in concert. It’s a flashy, vibrant detour, and the accompanying song is a deeply cheesy earworm that captures both of their vibes perfectly.

Playing together is also how they’re able to unleash massive amounts of damage in the turn-based brawls. When characters take enough damage, they can use their mash-up meter to pull off a special attack, like Final Fantasy 7’s synergies, and quickly send foes back to music school.

Scraps broadly play out conventionally, despite the abundant musical themes. The order of battle is a stanza, for instance, and while basic attacks amount to simply hitting things with an instrument, abilities are a bit more exotic, weaponising dances and riffs and headbanging. The musical layer rarely goes beyond thematic, though, so mechanically People of Note doesn’t amp things up. Granted, you can score extra damage by timing your attacks right, perfecting a QTE, so there’s a nod to musical rhythm, but it’s fleeting.

I was just starting to get into things when People of Note engaged in a terrible crime, forcing me to solve a series of uninspired puzzles. They were all, essentially, that classic videogame trope: a light and mirror puzzle. But instead of light, you’re strumming a guitar to power up some interactive dishes, which you need to move so their energy beam can hit a cog.

There’s no real conundrum here, and I’d had my fill after just one. Unfortunately that was followed by a whole series of them. That’s where People of Note started to lose me.

However! Developer Iridium Games has astutely realised that some folk might want to skip these puzzles, and it’s kindly provided the option to turn them off. If you don’t like turn-based battles but for whatever reason still want to play this turn-based RPG (no judgement), you can turn them off too.

You can effectively turn People of Note into an adventure game, if you’d like, picking the version of the game that speaks to you the most. Me? I think I’m mostly just here for the puns.