Rift of the Necrodancer review: this Guitar Hero riff seriously rocks

I’m not sure that any rhythm game has so accurately captured what it feels like to play an instrument as well as Rift of the Necrodancer. Sure, Rock Band may be a perfect music simulation thanks to its plastic instruments, but it doesn’t quite capture the full psychology of the craft. As glamorous as live music can look on a stage, actually getting to that point can be a battle.

As I slayed slimes and skeletons to the beat of the Crypt of the Necrodancer follow-up’s head-bobbing soundtrack, I flashed back to the long hours I’ve spent throughout my life recording music. I vividly remember days where I’d sit in front of a laptop recording take after take to get a guitar lick down. A flubbed note. Take two. Too slow. Take three. Wrong key. Take four, five, six, seven. It’s a patient — and often frustrating — process that requires the musician to learn through failure until they can lock in and commit everything to muscle memory. Each note is a monster to be vanquished.

Rift of the Necrodancer deconstructs the challenges of music performance and ingeniously reshapes them into the best Guitar Hero riff I’ve ever played. It’s the rare rhythm game that’s not just about matching beats, but finding ways to visualize and remember patterns. This is what your favorite guitarist sees when they look down at their fretboard.

Let’s rock

Despite being set in the same universe as 2015’s Crypt of the Necrodancer, developer Brace Yourself Games’ latest is a total departure from its breakthrough hit. The first Necrodancer game, and its excellent Zelda-themed spinoff, was a top-down adventure game with a twist: every movement had to take place on beat with the soundtrack. It was a wildly inventive idea, though it felt like a one-note gimmick at times too. Rift of the Necrodancer is a more traditional rhythm game built in Guitar Hero’s note-matching image, but it gets way more mileage out of that idea than you might expect.

It all seems straightforward at first. There are only three buttons I need to press (left, up, and right on my keyboard) as monsters come down a fretboard. When a green slime reaches the bottom of the screen, I simply press the corresponding button to slay it, just like pressing a button on a plastic guitar. I have 10 health points and completely missing monsters hurts me, though I can regenerate some health by eating scattered food on beat and activate a brief invincibility power if I nail an electrified sequence of foes.

That simple rule gets more complex with each enemy. A blue slime needs to be hit on two consecutive beats. The same goes for a bat, but it swaps rows  between each beat. A basic armadillo requires a quick, triple button tap, but different colored ones have their own rhythmic rules to follow. There are a lot of nuances to learn and Rift of the Necrodancer’s only real flaw is that it introduces them so rapidly in its tutorials that it’s hard to remember them all by look alone. Only one enemy type has a clear cue that helps telegraph its rhythm.

Learning how each monster works almost feels like deciphering sheet music. I see serpents as glissandos. Golden bats become arpeggios as they sweep across the fretboard. Each one is a visual marker that doesn’t just tell me when to press a button, but rather is a shorthand for a note sequence. In some ways, that makes Rift of the Necrodancer feel like a more accurate music game than Guitar Hero, even with its colorful monsters. It’s about decoding music’s tricks and learning to sight read them like a professional.

In that way, Rift of the Necrodancer is one of the best rhythm games I’ve ever played, and a devilishly tense action game too. It’s more akin to something like Thumper, making music feel like a battle of mental fortitude rather than pure physical skill. When I’m able to lock in during a tricky segment, one where I’m juggling different enemy types that weave together to form deceptively sensible patterns in the chaos, I feel like I’m nailing a complex solo. It’s not about parroting the notes like I’m playing Simon Says so much as it’s about learning how many forms of expression there are within a 4/4 beat.

It helps that I’m playing along to a diverse collection of original music fit for a Necrodancer game. The 30+ songs included here come from a who’s who of composers, from Josie Brechner to Danny Baranowsky, who play in a range of genres but still come out with a coherent soundtrack. Some tracks have me smoothly tapping along to mid-tempo jazz, while others require me to furiously slay rows of skeletons to gruff metal guitars. Every genre explored comes with its own rhythmic quirks just as much as the enemies do.

Everything about the hook feels like a total expansion on Crypt of the Necrodancer’s ideas. What looks like a more simplified framework at a glance soon reveals itself as an even deeper, more challenging music game. So long as you’re able to keep all of its enemies and board-altering traps straight, you’ll discover what it’s like to think in sound here.

Get creative

Rift of the Necrodancer doesn’t just cook up a great central hook; it builds a healthy suite of content that takes advantage of it. That starts with a standard free play mode where players can compete for high scores on global leaderboards across a few difficulties and remixes. Those harder modes are no joke either; the Impossible difficulty lives up to its name. Those who want to become masters will have a lot to pick at there — and they’ll look like rock stars once they can kill monsters at a high level.

I spent most of my time in the central story mode, which gradually walks players through most of the songs. That happens in between light dialogue that progresses a simple story about Cadence warding off the evil Necrodancer and his enemy-spewing rifts. Each chapter culminates in somewhat anticlimactic button-timing boss fights that feel significantly easier and less creative than the songs leading up to them. What’s more enjoyable is the collection of Rhythm Heaven-inspired minigames strewn between everything. Those require me to follow audio cues to successfully make hamburgers, do yoga, and keep a noisy meditation session on rails. They’re delightful teases of what Brace Yourself Games could do if it decided to make a full minigame collection one day.

Those core modes are rounded out by a collection of short challenges, but I’m more interested in what’s still to come. If it plays its cards right, Rift of the Necrodancer could stand to become a go-to music game for years to come. There are daily challenge songs to tempt players back every day and Brace Yourself Games says that it’ll add more songs over time too. Its ace in the hole, though, should be its modding support. Crypt of the Necrodancer’s success was due in part to its custom music scene, where modders added their own songs into the game. The studio doesn’t take that community engagement lightly here, as there’s a central main menu option that directs players to custom songs via Steam Workshop. So long as modders show up, Rift of the Necrodancer should have a healthy life ahead of it.

And I have no reason to think they won’t based on what’s here at launch. This is a full-featured rhythm game that got its hooks in me immediately. I tore through its five-hour story mode in a day on medium difficulty and was hungry for more. It felt like I’d learned an entirely new language by the end of that gauntlet. I was thinking in armadillo triplets, visualizing rhythms in ways that even the best music games can’t quite inspire. I want to sharpen that skill more — and not just to rack up high scores. When I’m in the zone, Rift of the Necrodancer helps me see complicated rhythms I’ve long struggled to grasp through colorful little monsters. With enough practice, I can see myself taking some new tricks back to the lab and toying around with them in my own songs.

A good rhythm game can, and should, leave players more curious about how music is made. I have friends who turned their Rock Band obsession into real drumming skill. It sounds silly, but it makes perfect sense: Music, like video games, is an act of play. It sits at the cross section of experimentation and mastery. Rift of the Necrodancer understands that every song is born from someone who’s determined enough to conquer a series of creative battles. It makes that literal in a way that only a video game could.

Rift of the Necrodancer was reviewed on PC and Steam Deck OLED.