Musical RPG lets you beat up music snobs, but I stuck around for the puns

People of Note casts Cadence as a would-be pop star who mixes genres and pushes back against musical snobbery. The demo dropped me into chapter two, with Cadence arriving in the rock city of Durandis to recruit a musician for her currently non-existent band, and it kept pausing for a steady stream of terrible puns.

Top of the class is the "accorgion"—a corgi spliced with an accordion—which is adorable and squishy and, naturally, pettable. The city is full of snooty fans split into subgenres—metal, punk, grunge—who mostly loathe one another and especially despise the country crowd, and they aren’t thrilled by pop-loving Cadence either.

Hidden owls dotted around the game can turn turn-based battles into simple quizzes; the owls are odd, complete with moustache and big hairdo. Cadence soon finds a friend in Fret, an aging rocker, and the two combine forces, fusing their sounds together.

musical rpg, cadence, durandis, accorgion, music snobbery, rock city, fret, turn-based battles, hidden owls, genre fusion