Imagine that your digital audio workstation was magically transformed into a platformer in which the notes of your composition were the platforms. That’s Matt Goode’s SongRunner in a nutshell. The seeds for this game were sown during the 2025 Game Maker’s Toolkit game jam. Mark Brown even featured Song Runner as one of his 20 favourites that year.
Each world is a looping track, with individual stages as variations. Pressing number keys 1–8 (in the original binding) adds a note to the timeline at the location of the playhead, which does 2 things. It adds a platform the character can use to traverse the level, and it also adds a note to the background music. As with other platformers, there are dangers like spikes and projectiles. With some levels, it is insufficient merely to get to the end of the level; you also need to collect music notes in somewhat out-of-the-way locations. Though, surprisingly, the game doesn’t force you to collect them and make it to the end of the level in one go; plus, you are free to add and delete platforms between attempts, thereby reducing the difficulty.
That you can play SongRunner with a MIDI keyboard suggests that this game might not just exercise your reflexes but also your creativity. I was intrigued. Quantified or gamified creativity is a well-known “cursed problem” in game design. As defined by Alex Jaffe, a cursed problem is “an unsolvable design problem, rooted in a conflict between core player promises.” In the case of SongRunner, the desire to create a musically satisfying track is frequently at odds with the desire to complete the level and progress to the next one. The first few levels are simple enough that many different musical sequences will allow you to progress. But it doesn’t take long for levels to be covered with so many obstacles and areas in which no notes may be placed that they become more like puzzles to figure out where to place platforms than spaces in which to explore interesting layers to add to the background music.
Cursed problems aren’t just difficult design problems. Since the two promises are contradictory, there is no way to fully satisfy both. Developers can either sacrifice one of the promises or design a game that combines multiple types of gameplay that each fulfill a different promise. Greg Lobanov took the latter path in Wandersong and Chicory: A Colorful Tale. Matt Goode takes the former in Song Runner. In the interest of offering players increasingly difficult platforming challenges, the creative aspect becomes somewhat compromised in later stages. The upshot is that you don’t need to be a trained musician or an aspiring composer to enjoy Song Runner. As Goode revealed in his playthrough of the demo, the backgrounds of some levels have faint suggestions of where to place platforms. These recommendations yield not only a satisfying platforming experience but also a musically interesting result.
In the Steam description, Goode says that SongRunner is “inspired by other hard-but-fair platformers like Celeste, Super Meat Boy, and N++.” At least in my hands, SongRunner lacked Celeste’s precise controls. (By the way, Mark Brown has an excellent video about why Celeste feels so great to play.) I struggled with the default control scheme, particularly moving with the arrow keys and jumping with the spacebar. I prefer to use a controller to play platformers. When I do play with a keyboard and mouse, I am much more familiar with WASD controlling movement. Before I found out that controls are rebindable, I even tried playing with my hands crossed so I could use my left hand to move and my right to jump. Remapping movement to WASD made things more comfortable for me, but I would have still preferred to move through the level with my controller, which unfortunately the game couldn’t recognize. It’s impossible to map every required input to a separate button, though if the left analogue stick were a pitch wheel, à la Wandersong, perhaps SongRunner could support controller-only input.
I also tried SongRunner with my MIDI keyboard. So I only needed to handle one device; I even mapped movement to piano keys. To my surprise, this was just as satisfying as playing with a computer keyboard. Though I did find myself sometimes pressing notes in the wrong octave, forgetting that controls are bound to particular keys, not to pitch classes.
I wish I could have used my mouse to select platforms that I wanted to delete. There is an undo button, but it can only undo 3 actions. If the first platform you placed is not in an appropriate location, you’ll need to delete all the platforms you placed. And if you’ve placed more than 3, you’ll need to reset the level.
It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words. The fact that it took watching the developer play his game for me to realize that I could rebind the controls or move my character on the world map suggests that a few words would go a long way to making sure all players know the options at their disposal.
For some reason, it’s common to consider a game with outsourced music solo-developed. SongRunner is a true solo project. Matt Goode is not only a game developer but also a musician, and it shows, particularly in the demo’s finale featuring his own vocals. In most levels, you can take as much time as you want to place your platforms. However, the finale is a single 4-minute song that doesn’t loop. You have only one chance to place your platforms and make use of them as the song moves forward, whether you’re ready or not. I found the rapid shifting between creating and using platforms so challenging that I have not yet reached its conclusion. I’m not sure this was intentional, but in the finale you can die by reaching the right side of the screen or by running into the lyrics, neither of which feels good. Nonetheless, the finale is a fitting capstone to the demo, musically and mechanically.
If you’re interested in a gamified DAW for creating fun loops, I would check out something like Oddada. But if you’re looking for a platformer with a novel concept, playable on a computer or MIDI keyboard, the demo of Song Runner, available on Steam, is well worth checking out. The full game hopefully releases later this year.
