Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation Early Access Review – The Budding Rock Band

Disclaimer: The Early Access version of Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation contains music created using the AI-powered music generator Suno. The developer describes the AI content like this: “We will be recording our own version of each song that was created by suno.com for placeholder music during early access. The game will remain in early access until all songs have been recorded by people.”

I’ve never been on the road with a band performing at different venues before. What I assume is a journey where you bond with your bandmates and play to endearing crowds. Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation is a more competitive version of that vision, currently in Early Access. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder developed and published by Gilligames where you battle other bands across the country to be the best. If you lose too many times, you are written out of existence.

Just like regular band battles, you compete with different performances to win over the crowd as much as possible. You choose a song from a list and must play randomly-drawn instrument cards to fill slots in a song. Each slot is color-coded and gets a bonus depending on the region you are in and instrument type. Matching cards to the appropriate slot is crucial to your song’s success. The more songs you play, the more you earn. There’s also more opportunities to wow the audience or get the edge over a competitor.

The tutorial takes you through the basics and really helped me learn the gameplay quickly. I was ready to jump into a campaign and begin bringing my rock band to success right after. However, some things aren’t properly explained. During the tutorial and regular play, I never saw an explanation for cards that go into colored slots. It wasn’t apparent until after I played the campaign and switched regions that the colors started being relevant.

I found that confusing because colored cards play a huge role in your song’s success. For example, a region you start in may favor pink-colored cards over black ones. This may not sound significant, but as you travel to new regions, your opponents become tougher. I struggled to keep up until I realized what the color-coding meant. To me, it wasn’t something intuitive or something you would grasp just from the tutorial.

When you aren’t performing, you are traveling around a region of the US. The goal is to defeat a region’s “boss band” to move on to the next one. To prepare for the battle, you travel around the region to play gigs or battle smaller bands. There are also music stores that function as upgrade locations that let you spend your money to strengthen your cards or instruments. Once you defeat the main “boss band”, you travel to another region to do it again.

Traveling through a region was fun and it was nice to get some slice-of-life moments. Texts from family members or friends can sometimes help but it’s nice to know people are supporting you on your journey. Finding a random hidden gig was one of my favorite moments because it made me feel like I was actually searching for a place to perform. I’m not musically inclined, but any chance to play in front of an audience is something worth taking.

Gameplay is easy in the beginning but I found that battles became significantly tougher as I progressed to new regions. My upgrades and cards couldn’t keep up with the bosses in future regions. I had to plan my upgrades around future regions, wondering if it would cost me my current run. While I adapted to the difficulty over time, I felt like it would be difficult to push through future runs if my upgrades never caught up.

Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation is easy to learn, though it does leave out some of the song bonus information in its tutorial. Obtaining cards and upgrades to create stronger performances is rewarding when you have the right combos. However, the difficulty greatly increases once you progress to a new area and you will need some luck to find the right combinations. The journey to be a great rock band is there even in its Early Access state, but it feels like it could be easier.

Victor reviewed Shady O’Grady’s Overnight Sensation on PC in Early Access with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and will not be changed.