There’s probably some genre of gaming where playing to the beat isn’t appropriate but nobody has found it yet. One that’s adapted particularly well, though, is the side scrolling auto-runner, whether that be something more traditionally platformish like HarmoKnight or a bit punchier like Muse Dash orUnbeatable. The newest game to work its jump and slash action into the beat is Rhythm Quest, which just dropped its chiptune-filled demotoday on Steam.
There’s probably a plot in here somewhere, or maybe not. A red-haired girl runs left to right while the music sets the pace, with the goal being to get to the end of the track with all coins collected. Every enemy drops a coin and most jumps have one hovering in the middle of the arc, but taking a hit sets the girl back to the most recent of the plentiful checkpoints while taking a five-coin penalty. Jumps are fairly forgiving, with it being easy to beat the level with a perfect score even when getting a few “too soon” rankings on the button press, but enemies are much less kind due to the range of her kick. It’s nothing unfair, only requiring a bit of audio-based precision, and if you’re able to hold to each song’s clear and obvious beat there won’t be an issue. The last of the demo’s eight songs makes that a highly qualified “if”, though, even though the entire game is played with just the two buttons for jump and attack.
While that makes for some fairly simple gameplay it’s exactly as it should be, because the joy of a good music game is being able to pound out the beats without getting lost in the controls. The Rhythm Quest demo’s levels are always clear in the action needed from the player, making it a lot of fun to bop along to the chiptune beat while aiming for the perfect run. On all levels but the last one that’s actually fairly easy to earn, but these are all introductory levels setting up the mechanics so that’s ok. By the time the final level is done you’ll have gone from “jump, kick”, to “jump and hold, kick kick kick, jump, double-kick double-kick single kick, jump, jump, oh crap that should have been on the half-beat”, at which point the game sets you back a short way to try again better.
The Rhythm Quest demo is outnow on Steamand a great way to blow through an evening’s gaming. The demo came with a new trailer which you may see below, showing off features that haven’t made it into the demo yet like selectable characters plus a waterfall that slows down travel speed so that enemies look like they’re closer together yet still get dispatched to the same rhythm as the others. The beat knows what to do no matter how things look, so give the demo a play-through if only to bounce along to the tunes.
