spop

Act 5 is about subversion, even before the act officially starts the game tricks you into thinking it'll be a fun little baseball themed act

the entire act takes place in a new (to you) ward where you've overheard from two other patients that a popular baseball player has just been admitted there.

immediately you'll notice that this is not a ward in a hospital, this is a baseball field, strange, but whatever, doesn't matter. this song introduces a new gimmick, subdivision notes, which are a type of SVT beat (i realize i didn't explain those, basically you're given a get, set, go count and have to hit the beat on go) subdivision beats are simple (at first) where all you need to do is listen for a queue and hit more than one note.

they look like this (it was so hard to time snipping tool to get these). the top image is for a double subdivision and the bottom is for a triple subdivision the tutorial for these notes is really good at getting you used to these types of notes being matched with each other and regular notes respectively and you'll have a good grip on them by the end of it.

the song starts out in the same field that going into the physiotherapy ward brought you to, and the music is nice, mostly just a test to see if you have the subdivision beats down by now.

that is until you reach this point and a baseball suddenly flies into the screen, putting the song to a pause and pulling away the curtain.

it was a dream, this is lucky, the baseball player who was admitted to middlesea hospital for tearing their rotator cuff during a game. after a quick cutscene the song starts again, cutting back to the baseball field, except it's no longer a dream, it's a nightmare, its pouring rain, baseballs fall from the sky in larger and larger amounts, every now and then you can see the eyes of Lucky's fellow teammates staring at you from the dugout. and then it happens, my favorite part of act 5, the one queue that made me fall in love with this game for a third time.

FOUR! TONK-TONK-TONK-TONK

all of the sudden you're hit with a quadruple subdivision beat, they didn't teach you this, lightning strikes in the background as its called out, normally this would be bad game design, throwing something at you out of nowhere without explaining how you're supposed to deal with it. but you hit the notes anyway, because by now you've learned to ignore the visual cues and go based off of the game's rhythm, because the queue's "Tonks" are also in tempo with how quickly you have to hit the divided notes, so without making a sweat you hit the notes perfectly, even while the nightmare sequence starts to fall apart, telling lucky to wake up, you still hit every note perfectly until the end of the song