People of Note Wiki

People of Note

People of Note is a 2026 turn-based role-playing game developed by Iridium Studios and published by Annapurna Interactive, released on April 7, 2026 for Windows, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S. It is set on the continent of Note, a world where music defines culture, society and conflict and where the nations are organised around musical genres. Players control Cadence, an aspiring pop singer from the pop city of Chordia who is shut out by the judges of the Noteworthy Song Contest and responds by assembling a band of her own, recruiting a rocker, an EDM DJ and a rapper from across the continent. Combat is turn-based but staged as a performance: battles are divided into stanzas that shift between genres, party members act in any order inside a stanza, and timed action commands plus genre mash-ups decide how hard each number lands. Between fights the band is built through Songstones, the game's socketed ability stones, while a cast of rivals and music-industry figures fills out the story.

• Stanza Combat - Battles are divided into stanzas, musical turns in which every party member can act in any order before the opposition responds. The turn-order bar along the bottom of the screen reads like a score, so planning a stanza means sequencing the whole band rather than picking one character's turn.
• Genre-Shifting Stanzas - A stanza can take one of four musical genres, and the genre in play changes the rules and the feel of that stretch of the fight; the band has to read the stanza and adapt its actions to it.
• Action Commands and Mash-Ups - Attacks, defences and support plays resolve with timed inputs, and characters can combine their genres into mash-up attacks that land harder than either performer's own number. Timing the inputs is the difference between a clean performance and a dropped beat.
• Songstones - The equipment layer is built on Songstones, socketed stones that grant abilities and passive effects. Each character has an affinity for particular Songstone types (Cadence runs Pop and Uncategorized stones), so building the band is a matter of matching stones to each performer's genre.
• The Noteworthy Song Contest - The story spine is a music competition: Cadence is rejected by its judges as a solo act and spends the campaign forming a band to prove that art does not have to conform to one style. Recruiting each new member is the structure of the campaign, and the contest is the stage the band is building towards.
• A Continent Divided by Musical Style - The world of Note turns music into geography and politics: its nations and cities are built around genres, so travelling to recruit a member means entering a region whose culture, colour palette and soundtrack all belong to that genre.
• Puzzle Battles and Optional Encounters - Alongside the story fights the game hides puzzle battles and optional encounters that reward exploration, tracked by completion challenges such as the Music of the Spheres trophy.
• Side Activities and Minigames - The towns between chapters are filled with optional content, including the Rhythm Wheel timing minigame in Chordia, the quiz-like Weird Owls and the scavenger hunts run by Maestro.