According to Radiohead, anyone can play guitar, but are they confident enough to take it on the road, crammed in a shitbox van stinking of ball sweat, Doritos and wasted dreams? O’ Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation gives you that chance without the Smell-O-Vision, humiliation, or being troubled with holding a plectrum the correct way. This isn’t a Rocksmith learn-to-play, but a rogue-like deck-building rockfest on wheels.
I’d never heard of this, nor of the developer’s, Gilligames, but I’ve heard of music. As a big music fan, notably the rawk variety, I was more than happy to live this fantasy life of being a rockstar, delivering quality music to the masses. However, before Spotify effed it up for musicians, the music industry has and always will be a challenge for artists. It’s fickle, two-faced, and incredibly cutthroat – all traits of this experience.
Fortunately, Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation isn’t about picking the right tune and investing your pennies in a potential hit. You’re more on the frontline as you’re the band; playing every instrument, laying down the vocals, and even handling the technical aspects. Before you can take the show literally on the road, you need to come up with a name for your band and then decide whether you’re a power chord player and want a relatively easy (not easy, easier) challenge, or a thrash metal twerp that lives life on the edge. This is quite a tough game, so I’d suggest the easier route to begin with.
Management is handled by your card deck, which consists of a guitar, bass, keyboard, drums and vocals. Taking place in the US of A, you select a state to begin, then are greeted by a familiar rogue-like map showing where you wish to head first. Besides fame and fortune (groupies, riders and syphallis), the goal is to beat the boss of each area through a Battle of the Bands competition. Each state has their own boss, but before tackling them, you have to play a series of gigs to earn some pennies, plus beat three local bands.
Money is essential in Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation as it will allow you to upgrade your cards, which includes adding modifiers to the base instruments. Random story events will occur, too, such as exploring an area in a text-based adventure style, which almost always results in you either earning some more cash, or being stung by a dodgy type or having your van break down. You could risk it and squirrel away the money as a means of a budget, as random events will bless you with card upgrades, better items, and of course, successful gigs will be beneficial to your deck, too.
Areas are limited, so you can only play each gig once rather than grind your way through and be OP. This is also important to note, as you initially have three lives. Each time you lose a battle of the bands, you lose some reputation. When it reaches zero, you’re irrelevant and have to start a new run. Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation goes relatively easy on you for the first state you pick, allowing you to get through unscathed, but it does increase significantly as the lower-level bands have better multipliers, with the boss having some killer cards that outdo yours, no matter how good you’ve been playing.
Anyway, onto the core gameplay and how that looks. All three show variations follow the same procedure: you have a setlist to the left, you’re dealt your cards, and then you have to place them based on the modifier. If you match an instrument to its respective icon, you get a multiplier on your score. These will literally blow your opponent out of the water (and vice versa) if you play them right. With those upgrades, you get double, triple, quadruple and so on points, but having a lot of cards doesn’t work in your favour, as unless you level your deck in a balanced manner, you can end up with a lot of bad hands. That’s a poorly worded sentence, but leaving it as is.
How the modes differ is simple. Essentially, you need the biggest score no matter what. For gigs, your score is converted into cash in Battle of the Bands, and you play a few rounds and have to get a higher score. If you lose, it’s fine, as long as you still have some reputation stars. For the boss battles, the rounds are longer, and they have those killer moves I mentioned. How you can manage this is, obviously, picking the right song based on your current hand.
What’s so interesting about Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation is that after defeating a band, you can pick a new song to add to your songlist and name it. A preview is available on how it sounds, but regrettably, it’s not how good the music sounds; it’s how good the modifiers look. Potentially, you can get astronomically high modifiers if you level up the right cards and are lucky enough to get them. While this is feasible, Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation isn’t without its debuffs, too. Broken strings and dodgy leads can make a song not score at all. To counter this, you can play a tech card to remove the debuff. As another flipside, if you don’t have the debuff, the tech card can modify your score and even double it.
As a rock fan, I was impressed with how good and varied the soundtrack is. The concept is simple enough; the question is whether it has that rogue-like loop we all seek. Songs aren’t played in their entirety, which is great, as that could get very boring quickly. The pace is decent, and the variety is good, too. Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation is currently in an Early Access stage, and according to the roadmap, the plans are to record 164 songs. At the moment, there are AI-generated placeholders, but they aren’t noticeable. I’d say it only takes a couple of songs until you learn how to play the game. It’s certainly easier than playing the guitar, but life on the road is hard, man. Give the demo a test run and see what you think.
