During the Guitar Hero craze of the early 2000s, you would occasionally show up to a house party to find a constellation of plastic instruments arranged around the television set. Intrepid visitors could try playing along with the hits of Weezer, Journey or the Beatles, tapping brightly coloured buttons in time with the music while the game appraised their timing. Soon, however, the zeitgeist moved on, and the plastic guitars and colour-coded drum kits shuffled into cupboards.
It is into this scorched earth genre that Voice Mimicry Show bumbles – a gloriously ridiculous party game that invites players to mimic not the hits of Motörhead, but a variety of common samples and sound effects: the growl of a chainsaw, the cluck of a chicken or the stomp of a monster’s foot. Via a USB microphone, the game compares the waveform of the source material with whatever sound came out of your mouth, then scores the result out of 100.
Developed by experimental Japanese designer Takahiro Miyazawa, and sold for less than the cost of a London pint, the social cost of entry is also surprisingly trivial. Even your great-aunt will have a go at copying a frog croaking, or an axe chopping firewood. And because success at the game isn’t limited to the tuneful, everyone feels equally unqualified. Each round is over so quickly, and filled with so many laughs, that, unlike the previous generation of karaoke-adjacent video games, Voice Mimicry Show never outstays its welcome.
The presentation is low-budget, the scoring inconsistent (and often riotously unfair), and you can’t even enter the names of contestants, but the selection of 131 sound files is ingenious. They range from the everyday (“bleat of sheep”; “gust of wind”) to the delectably vague (“delusion”; “anxiety”).
Video games, at their best, allow us to inhabit the lives of people who are different from us, or to assume the roles of protagonists in stories we have the power to shape, or fiddle with recreations of the systems that underpin civilisations. But they can also be a very silly little joke, shared among friends, which for 15 minutes or so make everyone love each other a tiny bit more.
