Platform(s): PC (version reviewed)
Genre: Rhythm, Music, Minigames

The indie gaming scene is in a good place with plethora of genres seemingly lost in time, like rhythm games. The once-mainstream gaming genre popularized by Beatmania and Guitar Hero has laid dormant, with talented fans of those music games putting their small-team indie spin on things.

Brace Yourself Games combined music with roguelikes to create Crypt of the Necrodancer back in 2015. That ended up a huge success at launch and even post-launch. It’s still getting updates to this day. Given its appeal, it naturally needed a follow-up; thus we get Rift of the Necrodancer.

While at first the lane and user interface setup seems familiar, everything else gets the dungeon-crawling flavour to a tee, and it’s all the better for it.

Dungeon Mash

Like mentioned earlier, Rift of the Necrodancer emulates rhythm games Guitar Hero and Rock Band with its lane and note setup. You see notes placed on either of the three lanes, and they all come down in sync to the beats of the background song. You hit either the left, up, and right keyboard pad at the right time to hit those falling beats.

The twist? Your notes are monsters from Crypt of the Necrodancer, and they have many, many different movement patterns. The skeletons are your regular notes, while wyrms are long notes; these require you to press and hold down the note and slash their long vertical bodies until that part of the song’s beat is wrapped up. Zombies cross the lane diagonally, while harpies wait a step and then cross two spaces on the lane.

They all move to the on/off beats of the song, with their frequency and enemy types dependant on the difficulty. Normal difficulty feels like a slightly harder Guitar Hero song, while Hard and Impossible adds in all sorts of monsters to give you more enemy notes, and more advanced note patterns for that extra challenge. Your main character Cadence has 10 hearts, losing 1 for each enemy that passes through the lane’s finish line.

Fortunately, there are health pickups on the lane after certain intervals or chorus sections so you’re not completely screwed. Plus, you can gather the equivalent of Star Power and activate a temporary score boost and multiplier while recovering lost health.

Danse Macabre

Fair warning: Rift of the Necrodancer can get tough, especially with how long these songs can go on. Most of the game’s musical challenges test your reflexes and your endurance, as they throw in loads of tricky beats and rhythm patterns that are both fun to play and require loads of retries to get right. The game’s challenging songs -usually higher than 120 BPMs- have you bombarded by a plethora of goons with different patterns that attempt to throw you out of a loop if you don’t figure out the sequence quick enough.

You’ll retry these stages a lot, but everything here from the simple controls to tight-but-fair note placements and timings just veers between the line of addictive and challenging. I just couldn’t stop once I popped a beat or two fighting the undead through a mix of rock, metal, hip-hop, and electronica tunes, all lovingly made by composers & musicians like Danny Baranowsky, Alex Moukala, Jules Conroy/FamilyJules, and Josie Brechner.

To mix things up, the game also has a Story Mode that not only gives you the levels in sequential lore order, but also a slew of minigames and boss fights. See, Cadence and her associates are warped into the present day through magic. While they try to adjust to the new life, they also have to deal with monster rifts popping up and turning innocent folks into zombies. You get to the bottom of the mystery by fighting monsters through the aforementioned rhythm battles, alongside completing the acts of flipping burgers & helping out in a kid’s show in rhythm minigame fashion similar to the ones in Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven series.

As you reach the end of each story mode’s segments, you fight off against a boss character. This is essentially a rhythm-based action sequence where you press the correct direction to the beat of the song (highlighted by the rings that close in on the input ala Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents) while also counterattacking your foe. Punch-Out! but with rhythm and fast-paced beat mechanics, and all the more fun and challenging for it. The higher difficulties of these fights omit the inputs (save for the yellow counterattack prompts) so you need to read your opponent’s moves and patterns to survive and outlast them.

And all these are really fun, if short and meant to be a diversion from the main lane-based gameplay. Coupled with minigames having their own difficulty layout, and also the Shopkeeper and Remix mode that turns the regular stages into tougher versions of the song, and the quest to collect diamonds to unlock modifiers and insane-level versions of existing melodies, and you have replayability in spades. I do wish the game featured a minigame-and-boss-fights gauntlet mode in the form of Rhythm Heaven’s remix stages, but maybe that’s reserved for future DLC.

At the end of the day, rhythm games are about getting better and playing them for a long while, and Rift of the Necrodancer delivers all that and more. And even if you;’ve somehow tapped out all of the game’s plethora of contents, you can make your own stage and use custom songs, then share it for all to play via the Steam Workshop. If anything, developer Brace Yourself Games planned ahead.

Full Ensemble

Rift of the Necrodancer is one of this year’s early heavy-hitters if we’re talking indie music games, and for a great pricetag of US$19.99/RM88. Replayable, tough as heck when you want it to be, and full of fun minigames that remind you of a time when Nintendo gave a crap about the Rhythm Heaven series: all this and a fun aesthetic make for a quintessential music offering that does its Brace Yourself Games brand proud. And loud, of course, given the infectious beats that come with it.

Pros

• Awesome lane-based rhythm gameplay with new monster twists.
• Fun Story Mode with cute minigames and tricky boss fight sections.
• Great aesthetics that’s different yet familiar to Necrodancer fans.
• Loads of challenges & custom song mode for more replayability.

Cons

• A few graphical glitches.
• Minigames could use a Remix mode gauntlet (ala Rhythm Heaven series).

Final Score: 90/100

Review code provided by publisher.