Chorus Gameplay Preview

Chorus is a science fiction role playing game set in outer space. You play as Nara, an ex lieutenant of a cult movement turned rogue after being ordered to destroy an entire planet.

Chorus is a pretty fun space sim. The entire game is spent with you controlling Nara in her spaceship. The flying and shooting feel incredibly smooth, even while playing on keyboard and mouse. As you progress in the game, you unlock powers that make the combat even more smooth! You unlock abilities such as drifting and teleportation. Now I know drifting in a space ship sounds ridiculous but once you get the hang of it you’ll be sliding around enemy space ships and environments like you’re in a The Fast and The Furious movie. The teleportation is great as well. It lets you instantaneously teleport behind enemy ships and mow them down. You feel very nimble while flying in Chorus.

The game’s structure is appealing as well. It’s basically an open world role playing game. You have a small sector of space you can travel freely in. The sectors have points of interest shown on the map. These points of interest are usually quest markers. These quests are limited in that most of them end up with you going somewhere, finding something, or shooting someone but the light dialogue and narrative elements help carry those segments. Most are completely optional so you can choose to do them at your leisure or skip them entirely. The side areas also may contain upgrade parts for your ship or additional credits.

Since the game is loosely structured as a role playing game, the narrative is, for the most part, well done. There are a lot of voice acted lines of dialogue that play as you fly in space (other than the short cutscenes). I personally love this method of delivering narrative as I absolutely detest it when a game takes away control from the player in order to force them to see or do something. The game takes the same route as Dune, throwing our terms, phrases, and events without explaining much of it, letting the player piece together things from context (other than the random whispering segments that goes into too much detail sometimes).

I did find some of the pacing of the dialogue and the phrasing of certain lines to be a bit awkward. The character also whispers to herself sometimes. They don’t quite explain why the character whispers to herself early in the game, Nara could be channeling Gollum here. I don’t find it unpleasant but I do find it pretty strange and at times, creates situations that are unintentionally quite humorous. It did grow on me so no real complaints here, just a humorous anecdote.

As for the mechanics aside from flight and combat, you have a simple equipment loadout for the ship and a very simple passive skill tree. As you keep using abilities and doing certain actions, the related skills level up and give you more passive bonuses. Some may want a more involved and complex system but I was perfectly fine with this as it kept the focus on the narrative, the flying, and the shooting.

Overall, Chorus came as a pleasant surprise. It’s a space game that feels absolutely fun to fly and fight in backed by a competent narrative and world building in a very streamlined and pretty package.