Rift of The NecroDancer

Out of all the games I didn’t fully love but wish I enjoyed as much as other people, sitting at the top of that list has to be Crypt of The NecroDancer. It’s not a bad game. I understand why folks love it so much. The rhythm game genre is stuff full of “tap the screen to the beat of the song,” or “tap the moving dots to the beat of the song” style games. Then here comes NecroDancer which asks what would happen if you turn it into a roguelike dungeon crawler? And then you get one of the most innovative to release back in 2015. Without its success I feel like we wouldn’t have got titles like Hi-Fi Rush, Metal: Hellsinger, and BPM: Bullets Per Minute. Games that also follow the rhythm action game mold except in different styles. With the two latter games being shooters and the first being a third person character action game. NecroDancer is important amongst the pantheon of earlier indie games because it shows experimenting with crazy ideas that may or may not blend well together is worth doing. It’s how you get games that stand out compared to Ubisoft releasing open world sandbox number fifty two. Being revolutionary is fun.

I just didn’t really jell with Crypt of The NecroDancer. I’m the type of person who likes to feel each step of the journey should pay off. The more I played the game I got frustrated, and it didn’t contain the roguelike conventions I’ve gotten used to. A majority of upgrades are tools you can pick up in the field at random. Your health bar gets knocked out quickly if you make mistakes, and trying to pick yourself up afterwards was more difficult as healing is sparse. You’d die to a boss ten seconds in without getting proper practice with it and accompanying enemies. Even if you do manage to beat the game with the main character it’s revealed you have to do it two more times with characters with even less health resources. Creating a roguelike with one the lowest clear rates out there. I feel like if I went in with the approach of “play this for fun” I would’ve kept playing it, but I went in wanting to reach the finishing line and ended up feeling mixed. A real shame, because ten years later the game still maintains a high quality standard and the devs kept adding new content up until recently. Brace Yourself Games isn’t defined by one game. They are also defined by Cadence of Hyrule, a Zelda spinoff sequel to their original game, and their most recent game Rift of The NecroDancer. Okay, so they are defined by one game, but I’m going somewhere with this so listen. Instead of making a rhythm roguelike they made rhythm.

Just rhythm. Just a traditional rhythm game utilizing the characters they’ve made over the years. I was even confused with the direction they were going. Crypt of The NecroDancer despite being mixed on was unique. It was innovative rather than doing more of what’s been done before, and the studio chose to do more of what’s been done before. Then halfway through development the team fired half of their staff, which they felt bad about. A tragedy that keeps happening across the gaming world as game development becomes more expensive by the day. I knew the game was going to be good, but compared to previous Brace Yourself products and other games in the genre I didn’t know if it would be able to stand on its own two feet. Rift of The NecroDancer, can you tapdance yourself through the shadows? Well it’s an indie game made by respected devs, so of course it would. Despite all I said, I knew Rift of The NecroDancer would be good based on the initial reveal. It's colorful, energetic, and had a spark other rhythm games didn’t have. 

I knew the game was going to be good, but what I was not expecting was it to be better than I’d hoped. Rift of The NecroDancer is my favorite game by Brace Yourself Games. It is a testament that these guys can do anything with enough thought and time, and shows indie devs continue to make games that rival the biggest of titles. I beat the game a month ago on a whim, but kept on playing just for how fun the core gameplay loop was. Compared to that other rhythm-based indie game, cough cough Everhood 2, this was a game I loved replaying the content over and over without getting sick of. It really is just pure fun. An album you can bop your head to at any time. Rift of The NecroDancer is one of 2025’s better indie games and I’d say it at least deserves to be nominated for the best soundtrack category, because thinking about it now makes me want to go play more of the game. Today we’re talking about why I love Rift of The NecroDancer, and why it utterly deserves your attention. Party on till the rift carries yah to the end of time and space!

Story

The plot of Rift is quite simple compared to the previous NecroDancer games. Cadence was busy battling monsters conjured by the NecroDancer through one of his crypts when all of a sudden a giant portal opens up. She gets sucked into the portal and when she awakens she finds herself in another world. Our world. Traffic lights, skyscrapers, and modern day businesses as far as the eye can see. She’s not alone in this world and her helping friends got transported here too. They settled down into this new world easily, but Cadence wants to figure out how to open the rift up again so she can return home to her family. With the help of Dove they locate the NecroDancer, who works a deadened job at a burger joint. He may be a master of magic and the undead, but he has no involvement with the rifts. Saying he woke up here with no memory on how it occured, and is unable to conjure a spell to return home. Cadence must figure out how to return everyone home, and the only way is through understanding the wild rifts that keep opening around ‘em. A pattern she quickly recognizes as they open whenever her friends struggle to maintain the jobs they are running. Gyms, museums, studios, etc. A long day for this swaying hero.

Gameplay

The game is essentially a cross between Guitar Hero and some elements of NecroDancer. I’d be surprised if any of you dear readers remember what Guitar Hero was as that is a relic of the PS3 and Xbox 360 era. Guitar Hero was a game where you plug a plastic guitar into the console and rocked out to licensed songs the developers where to get for the game. Playing the colored notes on the screen at the right time using the colored buttons on the controller. South Park did a whole episode about it where one of the characters becomes a drug addict, and if you manage to get an episode of South Park made about you then you surely made it far in life. This game is that, but you don’t need an overpriced controller and the controls are simplified to four essential buttons. Once a song begins a barrage of enemies descend down the screen towards arrows. These arrows are controlled using buttons on the controller. It’s different on PC, but I was playing the Switch version. I recommend using the D-pad and right side buttons as the game suggests, because using a joystick is going to lead to input delays or failed registers. Left is for the left arrow, right is for the right arrow, up for up, and down is to press all three buttons at once without having to do a weird finger press just to do so. Press the buttons at the right time for when the notes hit, and if you time the presses perfectly you score more points. More points are gain through combo streaks with point multipliers building up with higher combo maintenance.

What makes Rift of The NecroDancer different from Guitar Hero though is you aren’t mashing the buttons to descending notes. No, you’re instead fighting the many enemies seen throughout the NecroDancer series. Slimes, skeletons, bats, dragons, armadillos, and the list goes on. Each enemy moves or acts differently, and you need to learn how to deal with them. Some enemies are faster than others, and different colors can change how an enemy operates. For example, a white skeleton can be killed with one button press. A yellow skeleton loses its head as the body moves forward until it hits something blocking it. The black skeleton must be hit twice before the body starts running away like the yellow skeleton. Failing to hit enemies at the right time leads to you taking damage. Cadence starts with ten health points each song, and it can be restored using any food items that fly towards you. Allowing you to keep the pace up instead of immediately being forced to do everything over. Lose all your health points and it’s game over. If you’re playing the story mode the core gameplay loop is occasionally broken up with minigames. Moments heavily inspired by Rhythm Heaven, which you also probably don’t know and I don’t wanna waste more time explaining games that even I haven’t played before. Let’s just hope you can chase the many doubts of your friends away and stop the ongoing musical chaos.

Thoughts

Rift of The NecroDancer isn’t doing a whole lot new nor is it doing anything beyond one single thing. Deliver a good rhythm based core gameplay loop, and that gameplay loop slaps. It slaps harder than a clown pie face gag, and there’s probably a reason why I kept playing this even after I rolled credits on the main campaign. The main story is four to five hours which isn’t very long, but I put ten eleven hours in just replaying songs over and over. The game is nonstop fun and joy, and you lose track of time banging your head to each thriller rift or playing songs back to back. Gameplay is the main highlight and it’s very well designed. Whenever a new enemy or gimmick is introduced most of the time they’re thrown at you by themselves. That way even if you mess up you’re given another chance as the same exact enemy is thrown at you a few more times until the song continues. Even if that time isn’t enough there’s a practice mode that allows you to see how an individual enemy functions before being thrown into action. There’s a practice mode in fact, so if you want to test a song you’re not used to or warm up to a harder song you can do so. Having a health bar and healing along the way makes it so that you can keep yourself up even when you’re doing terrible, but if screwing up too much the failure state activates quickly and you can just retry instead of having to wait until the song is over, your scores add, and you fail.

I will admit though that difficulty curves all over the place, and it’s not that the order of songs are bad. They’re well done, get harder as you go on, and genuinely well paced. It’s what happens in a song that makes difficulty bounce all over. You may have a song that’s well paced, enemies are thrown at you calmly, and all of a sudden five different things are going off. Two bats that cross the screen and you must quickly react to where both will land. A slow flying enemy approaches, and then a red one comes zooming in on the other side making it hard to determine your time to react. An entourage of slimes some of which bounce around faster than the others, so you gotta time your button presses faster. I don’t get why there’s some sections of slow songs where you have to mash buttons faster, because visually it looks odd compared to having them scroll to the beat of the music. Rift of The NecroDancer is a very tricky game and while I wouldn’t say that it reaches the levels of unfair bullsh*t Crypt of The NecroDancer it is a game that isn’t afraid to throw things at you unknowingly at times. It's a game that asks you to get good, and that I did. I got good by playing the game on easy when medium got too tricky, and after that I played the songs on normal. Turns out different difficulties on different songs rank you differently.

This is my favorite part about Rift of The NecroDacner and the reason I came back for more. It rewards you for mastery and doesn’t mind you playing on a lower difficulty just to get used to a song. In the basic mode where you simply play you unlock diamonds depending on difficulty you play a song on. Higher difficulties unlock more diamonds, and more diamonds unlock new songs or harder modes. I don’t mind grading at the end of each song, but it’s the diamonds that pushed me to pursue higher challenges. Even then I went back and kept replaying old songs, as I wanted to see how better I’ve gotten. Watching a C become a B, and then a B become an A. It rewards you for overcoming challenges, and then the player feels pushed to see if you do better each time. Rift of The NecroDancer eggs you on for more, but the big question is if the music is good? How can you have a rhythm game witho- yes it is. Shut up. The music is f*cking stellar, and the soundtrack is varied as the developers brought back a multitude of artists from previous games to deliver different songs. You have Danny Baronowsky, Sam Webster, Jules Conroy also known as FamilyJules, Alex Moukala, etc. None of the music is bad and there were times I was just vibing. Letting the song carry me and giving perfect deliveries each press.

If you get sick of the main mode there are different modes to try. There’s the story mode as I had mentioned, and in it are not main mode songs but also minigames and boss battles. All of which offer variety so the main story doesn’t get tiring quickly. The minigames all function differently from each, and boss battles work like rhythm based Punch-Out!. I wouldn’t be surprised if five years from now the developers focus more on this and create a full game around the idea. I do really like the story. If you play that first before doing the main mode you unlock every song real quick which is nice. The plot of the story mode though isn’t the greatest. Each chapter follows the same pattern. One of Cadence’s friends gets distressed running their business, a snobby person causes them to doubt themselves, a snobby person is secretly an evil monster, and then you go fight the snobby person. It’s a simple narrative to gloss over, but personally I can’t help but feel entranced by what the game is doing. There’s energy and wit, and I smiled the entire time as the whole thing is basically about inspiration. Cadence being on the side to help get her friends to where they need to be. Cultivating lovely art in the world they’re in, and the whole thing ends with an animated dance montage where they fix the world and return home. I suggest playing the main story once just so you unlock content easily and learn how each song works. That is the main point of game campaigns afterall. Introduce yourself to the basics.

I love the art style for this game and how they reimagined the cast of NecroDancer. What was once a bunch of 16-bit sprites are now sexy. Every character in this game is sexy! It’s this and the Hades games that make me question my bisexuality…… Anyways, the animation isn’t complex but the way it moves along with each song is energetic. Getting you to go go go and bang your head some more. Rift of The NecroDancer is a fantastic game and you can already tell I strongly recommend it. Especially those who are major fans of rhythm games. The developers have been adding tons of new content over the past few months all of which have been crossover content. They added songs from Super Meat Boy, Celeste, Pizza Tower, and as of the time of writing this they put in f*cking Hatsune Miku and a list of other vocaloid artists. I don’t give two sh*its for vocaloid music, but if an indie developer manages to bring Hatsune Miku into their game you know they made it far in life. The game goes for the usual twenty dollar price tag, and the added songs are five dollar bundles so decide if you want it or not. I’m gonna go play more of the game now for fun. In the end I am going to give Rift of The NecroDancer a 9/10 for excellence at best.

9/10, Excellence