With Just Shapes & Beats now available on Amazon Luna, a new audience can experience its explosive fusion of music, color, and controlled chaos—instantly, in the cloud. Since its debut, the game has stood out as one of the most distinctive rhythm-action experiences available, blending accessibility, challenge, and a surprising arc… without a single line of dialogue!
We sat down with Berzerk Studios, the developers behind the game, to learn how it all began, how its genre-defying design came together, and what lessons they’re carrying forward after shaping beats into gameplay.
First off, can you tell us a little bit about the inspiration for Just Shapes & Beats?
Honestly, the main inspiration was the music itself. Many moons ago the designer, Simon ‘Lachhh’ Lachance, went to a chiptune concert and bought a CD. Gosh, remember CDs? So, after like 15 minutes of blasting that in the car he started seeing patterns and gameplay. He’d planned to go to a local game jam later that month, so he figured he’d use that as a starting point. The end result was quite different from the original game jam concept, but the main vision remained: to give life to incredible music from amazing independent artists.
How does Just Shapes & Beats merge genres to create a new experience?
I think it’s a mix of both easy-to-understand concepts and subversion of expectations.
When people come in expecting a game about shapes, and about beats, they think it’ll be about being good at rhythm games. Instead, they are served a game for fans of music, that is easy to pick up while getting engrossed in a dialog-less story.
You don’t need to have a musical ear to play the game, all you need is to enjoy the tracks and the fireworks that come with them.
What can new players expect from the game?
Words hardly do it justice, but in short, each stage is crafted around the music that’s playing, players incarnate one of four simple shapes and they must survive the tracks by avoiding the pink shapes that the music creates.
Sounds abstract, but you’ll get it in 10 seconds.
Any tips for those new players?
Don’t get hit. No seriously, that's it.
What kinds of gameplay modes are there?
You can play in 4 different modes:
The Story mode where you get to adventure into the world, this is usually preferred for new players.
The Challenge runs where you get thrown into a gauntlet of random tracks. It’s a good ‘pick up and play for a bit’ experience.
The Playlist, which lets you make a playlist of tracks you want to play, or practice if you are the achievement hunter kind.
The Party mode is a fun mode that you can just leave playing in the background. There are no stakes, can’t lose, let it run to have both a lightshow and a soundtrack to your party, and if anyone wants to sync up a controller they can play too!
All of these can be played alone or with up to three friends, or acquaintances, or enemies, I don’t judge.
Has the community provided inspiration or helped with new content for the game?
Oh dear, funny story, back when the game was still in very early development we loved to mess around. We made a custom stage for a friend’s birthday with an iconic 90s track for a build that was only meant for him. Dumb stage, no game design really, just a big joke. We forgot to remove the track right before going to a big tradeshow but figured it was fine, confident nobody would find it, it was well hidden and all. Took about an hour, some toddler not only finds it, but plays it right as a large influencer walked by with the camera rolling and then told his massive community about it. So that’s how I ended up having to spend over a year trying to license the track from the 90s Mortal Kombat movie by The Immortals.
I regret nothing.
What features took the longest to get just right?
Definitely the story, we couldn’t find a way to pace how we had it in mind to match the energy of the game. Took a long time to finally accept that a certain part of the game, the first part post tutorial, was not in line with the player’s experience. The game started by coming at you hard, then had a very deliberate slow and quiet, almost contemplative moment, then went back super hard again, the emotional roller coaster didn’t really work as people weren’t invested enough yet. We ended up cutting that part at launch, then released a reworked version as the Lost Chapter in one of our last updates, and it made so much more sense there. The first playthrough is now super well-paced, then once you are more into the story you get to enjoy that slower moment to its fullest. It kinda feels like when you are watching a movie for the second time and get to see all the hints later.
Is there a level, song, or feature you’re especially proud of?
Our partnerships with Yacht Club Games and Toby Fox for sure, having not only gotten to work with them, but also to give the opportunity to some of our contributing musicians to remix some of their iconic songs was incredibly rewarding. I can still feel the chills I got from the first listens of the remixes, probably because I still get them to this day.
Any lessons from Just Shapes & Beats that your team is taking into future projects?
Trusting our instincts. There was so much second guessing during the development because we had so many partnerships falling through, people not believing in our vision, at some point you start wondering, hey, maybe they got a point, maybe this won’t work. But then I’d watch players around the world with the biggest ear to ear grins while playing, some even just watching, and I knew we had something special.
And with those final words, we thanked Berzerk Studio for their time and got back to playing “something special,” and abiding the advice “don’t get hit.” Just Shapes & Beats is now available to play on Amazon Luna for free to Prime Members. No downloads, no barriers—just pure, music-driven mayhem ready to play at the press of a button.
