With a vacation comes a big choice: What game should I focus on during the trip? I thought about grinding out the harder levels of Super Meat Boy 3D, but I was looking for something more chill. I could have dabbled more with Slay the Spire II, but I already know that’s a game I’ll be playing for a long time. I wanted something that I could really get lost in and finish in a little over a week. People of Note, a new music-focused RPG from Annapurna Interactive and Iridium Studios, turned out to be exactly what I needed.

In the game, you play as aspiring pop singer Cadence. What starts as a journey to outperform a popular boy band turns into a sprawling adventure where the fate of the world is eventually decided by Cadence and the ragtag band she puts together. But in People of Note, just about everything is about music in some way. Each major character gets a fully animated musical number. Areas of the game are themed after different musical genres. Most lines of text include some kind of musical terminology or pun. I even found a sign near a birdcage offering a “free bird.” Sometimes, all of the music references feel a little overboard, but I respect the commitment.

Music is perhaps most important during the turn-based battles. Naturally, they’re backed by great tunes — I was constantly tapping my feet during fights. But to be most effective, after selecting a move, you’ll often have to time button presses well (indicated by a ring closing in on a circle, like in the Nintendo DS classic Elite Beat Agents) to hit for the most damage or recover the maximum amount of health. When it’s your party’s turn (technically, a “stanza”), you can also see exactly how many moves you have and what the enemies plan to do in a musical staff at the bottom of the screen, so there’s lots of strategy involved to maximize what you do.

You can play your characters’ moves in any order, so I’d often spend a beat mentally mapping out the most effective way to buff my characters and dish out damage. You can also customize your team with “songstones” and “remix stones,” which work similarly to Final Fantasy VII’s Materia system by letting you assign specific moves to characters and giving those moves helpful perks.

Everything really comes together during the bosses, which I nearly always thought were just hard enough on the game’s standard difficulty. More than once, I’d lose a boss fight with one or two turns until I would have won, meaning I could overcome them by switching up my songstones or taking a few minutes to grind another level. Some of the boss designs are excellent, too, including a hilarious nod to the Dragon Ball series. (The character uses a move called “Kamehayeehaw.”)

Not everything is a hit. The game takes a few hours before its systems really open up. There are a bunch of puzzles in the game, but they mostly boil down to flipping switches in the right order, which got tedious. The story is a pretty typical RPG journey, and I often mashed through conversations so I could get back to exploring and fighting.

But none of those issues bothered me too much. During my break, I found myself picking up my Steam Deck every spare moment I could to get in a few battles or move the story forward, and I was able to beat the game in about 20 hours, meaning I wrapped it up just before I went back to work. Yes, it has a lot of familiar RPG tropes, but it condenses them into a manageable package. And as a way for me to unwind, People of Note hit the perfect tone.

^{People of Note is now available on Nintendo Switch 2, PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X / S.}