Syrenne McNulty, a frequent NWR guest and contributor, is a producer for Rytmos. This review was written and edited without input from anyone using Syrenne.
We’re all probably familiar with rhythm games where timed button presses are central to the experience. But music-centric games rarely evolve beyond that particular framework. More recently, the musical puzzle trend has become more pronounced, such as Backbeat, which was released in March 2023. Rytmos is a musical game that not only uses music as a tool to force players to perform certain actions. Rather, it educates players on how music is constructed and allows them to experiment with music from all kinds of cultures. The end result is a short but incredibly satisfying puzzle game that even offers new recommendations for later listening.
Rytmos is made up of a galaxy of asteroids, each with a core musical style. If these planets fall apart, it’s up to the player to reconnect them. The game’s stylistic background is meant to be abstract, as it’s a way for players to learn more about the instrument or musical style they’re trying to restore. After choosing a system, each named after a particular musical style, the player has three asteroids to choose from. Line puzzles await you on each of these asteroids. Each has the same goal: create a loop where the line connects to itself. However, there are nodes along the surface of the asteroid that can be connected to lines that, when connected, will start playing a song. To receive the gold score on the planet, the line must be looped through each of these nodes as well.
This may sound like a simple concept, but the Floppy Club developers have incorporated many tricks to keep you on your toes, such as moving around tiny ice cubes that block your path. Freely move the Ice Cube to retrace your line in order to turn certain corners or block dead ends. Another system uses planetary gaps to warp continuing lines to different points, making “impossible” angles. The best comparison would be the puzzles of games like “The Witness,” or, for those familiar with Nintendo games, perhaps Zelda’s dungeon ice slide his puzzles, or older generation Pokemon his game Jim his It will be a challenge. Rytmos square planets each have 6 puzzles, short and easy to pick up and play.
What I really like about Rytmos is its simplicity and focus on specific themes. In this case, it is dedicated to teaching players about all kinds of different world music styles and instruments. At the beginning of each system, you’ll see text about the type of musical style you can expect. After completing a planet in that system, it transforms into an instrument that fits the musical style. You can also play around with the instruments and record them before completing the level. This makes the experience of learning how an instrument works feel really intuitive. Don’t expect to have a complete music creation tool here. But it turned out to be an excellent insight into all kinds of music I had never heard before. At best, I was learning more about the musical styles I was already a fan of (shout out to “Das System,” which dedicates three planets to German electronic music). Even if you don’t have a lot of worlds to explore, the variations you’ll see here are really impressive.
Just by completing puzzles and playing around with instruments, you might think this game would be perfect for Switch. That’s right. Unfortunately, the game is surprisingly slow in both handheld and docked modes. The game has frequent loading moments, and even after loading, many frames are dropped when switching between different levels or spinning asteroids to find the next puzzle. I should also add that I was a little disappointed that the recording option was disabled. As such, you may not store your musical compositions or share them with others, for example via social media. Since its launch, there have been several updates that improve performance, so we hope to see recording functionality added in the future.
Overall, we had a great time at Rytmos. Its puzzle gameplay is perfect for picking up and playing in-between sessions of larger games. The puzzles made me feel smarter and changed the gameplay often to keep it from getting old. What really taught me more about the music used was that I felt like the developers really wanted to share their love of music with me from all over the world. I couldn’t speak for the sound of African jazz before playing this game. Thanks to Rytmos, I’m really happy to have discovered this genre. It’s not a perfect port, as the Switch version is jerky at times, but if you’re looking for an easy-to-understand puzzle game that you can play for hours on end, this is definitely the game to turn up the volume on.
