Image: Glee-cheese studio & Wired Productions

I love it when games about music create their own universe of songs, and few games have committed as hard to that as Mr. Records, which is currently one of the top-charting games of the Next Fest. Honestly, you should just be trying it for yourself, but if you're still on the fence, let me sing its praises.

Presented in charmingly consistent cartoon art, George is the titular Mr. Records, an ageing collector of all things musical and now enjoying his twilight years as owner of a music shop. While the heart of the game is jumping, kicking and sliding through musical dreamscapes based on George's music collection, a large chunk of the game is dedicated to running the store, talking with the locals and helping customers find the records they're looking for, even if they didn't know they were looking for it.

There's just a lot of cozy appreciation for music as a whole here, but never is that more clear than in the music stages themselves. Each band has its own visual style of dream to wander through, and the developers (who are also a band) have produced nearly fifty songs across many genres. The demo alone has Beatles-esque psychedelia, old-school rock and roll, funk, spacey prog rock, and R&B. There's even a bit of Thriller-esque Halloween disco.

While the unlockable Hard variants of the songs can get pretty tricky, this is far from a hardcore rhythm game. You won't need to do anything as wild as juggle analogue dancing and six-button action at the same time like In Falsus, for instance, and both the timing and scoring seem quite forgiving.

While the notes come a bit more thick and fast on Hard mode, you'll only ever be worrying about hitting Up or Down, Jump and Kick, so don't be intimidated. This one's about loving music, not wanting to throw your keyboard through your monitor after missing a beat in the middle of a 300+ note breakbeat barrage. But of course, as with any good rhythm game, there is a level editor, and you can expect the community to make some utterly unhinged stuff that'll work your fingers to the bone.

This one feels like it's going to be a real hit next year, and a great introduction to rhythm games for folks who might feel a bit intimidated seeing people hammering their way through DJMax games on custom controllers. But in the meantime, let me reassure you that there are other gentle on-ramps to musical gaming, and we've got a crash course of them (escalating from single-button simplicity to hammering on your ENTIRE KEYBOARD) right here.

Mr. Records launches early next year, and the demo should be more than enough to get you on board with it. Go on, give that record a spin.