RIft of the Necrodancer has me thinking a lot about the relationship between my brain and my body, and I think the two need to go to couples counseling or something.
More than being one of the best examples of the video game community raising millions of dollars for charity, Games Done Quick is also an incredibly unique video game recommendation service. I was glad to see this year’s event had a rhythm game exhibition that featured neither Beat Saber nor one of the many games that require a big-ass arcade cabinet, but something that I, theoretically, could acquire and play with ease: Rift of the Necrodancer. Amazed by runner Quacksilver’s masterful performance, I immediately picked up the game for the Nintendo Switch 2, but after a few unproductive hours with it, I had to put it down. I could not play this game.
Rift of the Necrodancer looks much like other rhythm games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but instead of notes coming at you, here players face a long track with constantly approaching monsters split across its three lanes. The monsters approach you in time with the beat of the music and you’re supposed to hit the correct directional button—left, right, or up—when the monsters reach the end of their respective lane. It looks much like other rhythm games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but its monsters behave in a variety of challenging ways and, making this relatively straightforward gameplay loop more complicated, I was attempting to play with a controller.
Since I was holding my Switch 2 in my hands, I could either use my thumbs to hit the directions on the left Joy-Con’s D-pad or the right one’s face buttons, or split the directions up between both hands. Some monsters can require you to press two buttons at the same time, a task I thought would be too much for one thumb to handle so I tried splitting the control scheme. The results of this choice beat my entire ass. I’m playing on medium difficulty, failing the very first song in the game because instead of feeling the rhythm of the music, my brain is trying to manually direct which thumb is gonna hit which button. It was totally unworkable, to the point where I felt legit shame. I consider myself pretty good at rhythm games! I still have my copy of Elite Beat Agents on the Nintendo DS and went so far as to import its Japanese analogue Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. There’s no way I should be failing this soon on something so simple. So I changed the venue, going over to my computer to play this game with a keyboard set-up which I thought would feel more natural.
That switch-up worked, at least until it didn’t, because Rift is an insidious-ass rhythm game that demands so much more than “press the buttons on the beat.” As mentioned, Rift signifies the beat with monsters rather than notes—a fitting choice for a companion game to Crypt of the Necrodancer, which was all about dungeon exploration at 180+ beats per minute. Each monster has different properties and, depending on its color, might take more than one button press to destroy. A green creature goes down in one hit, blue monsters take two, and yellow three. A green slime is the simplest of creatures, you destroy it on the beat with one press of a button. But skeletons and bats move either up and down a single lane or across multiple lanes each time you strike one until it is destroyed. Meaning if I’m facing down a blue bat and a yellow skeleton, I have to keep in mind how they move and how many times I need to hit them to kill them, and I have to do that on top of making sure I do it all either on the beat or on a half-beat because fuck syncopation, okay.
In trying to keep all that in mind, the communication between my brain and body just broke down. I could hear the beat and instinctively know when I’m supposed to press the right button, but that signal got lost in transmission. My mind is pissed at my fingers like, “Get it together, dumbass,” while my hands flop uselessly about the keyboard. And this is on medium difficulty. The songs I’m playing are bops that move at a leisurely 120-130 BPM. After failing the third song in the first chapter of the game’s story mode. I had to walk away, humbled by the realization that a skill I took pride in isn’t there anymore, or will at least take a lot more time to restore.