Soulslike (and Runescape) fans have been playing rhythm games all along, NecroDancer dev says

Rhythm games are about recognizing patterns and pressing the right buttons at the right time. A few minutes of Guitar Hero, osu!, or Beat Saber will teach you that.

These rhythm games were my obsession in the 2000s, but I was part of the group in the mid 2010s that got tired of Rock Band DLCs and didn’t want to learn guitar with Rocksmith. We retired our rockstar dreams and put our plastic guitars in the basement. Rhythm games winter started, and the titles that came out later and survived were mixing music with other genres, like Brace Yourself Games’ roguelike Crypt of the NecroDancer.

“For the gamers who love music, the next step to enjoyment is weaving the songs directly into the fabric of the game’s design, whether that’s a beat-em-up, platformer, or roguelike” NecroDancer communications director Madeleine Gray exclusively told Destructoid. “Which is why I think we’ve seen a lot of success in recent games like Hi-Fi Rush, Metal: Hellsinger, and Dead as Disco, who do this really well.”

Gray spoke about what other variants of rhythm games could exist and even explained why a soulslike action RPG would make sense.

“Soulslikes are already rhythm games of sorts,” Gray said. “Both genres rely heavily on pattern recognition, memorization, and perfectly timed actions to overcome difficult challenges. Someone just needs to integrate music as a core cue.”

While Gray didn’t say a souslike NecroDancer game is coming, she kept our hopes up that after the Rift of the NecroDancer experiment, “there’s still a lot of space for us to explore within these [Rift variants] alone, but our designers are always noodling on different ways to push the franchise.”

Gamescom previews included a lot of soulslikes, so much so that the genre is close to fatigue. I’m not a fan of hardcore RPGs, but I would love to play one with music and rhythm. Maybe it would be as if Hi-Fi Rush met “rhythm violence” game Thumper.

A rhythm soulslike becoming mainstream is as unlikely as a Super Mario soulslike. The game would likely become easier if music was tied to combat, since it would be an extra queue aside from boss animations and other visual queues that already exist in genre staples like Dark Souls and Elden Ring. If you remove visual cues, however, you’re back to square one with a pure rhythm game.

Beat and rhythm can use complicated time signatures and become hard to follow. Rhythm Heaven does that, and I would love to see bizarre tempos in soulslike combat. And who knows, maybe we’ll get to play something like this in the future and hear more thoughts from the NecroDancer team on it.

Wait, so RuneScape is a rhythm game?!

Gray opened my eyes to how RuneScape is actually a rhythm game. Well, her friend Freddy did, but she was generous to share his wisdom and prove that rhythm games exist in unlikely places.

“The [RuneScape] server only updates once every 0.6 seconds, so every click you do in the game is bound to that kind of restriction,” Gray explained. “Basically, there is a 100 [beats-per-minute] rhythm to the game where you can only fit in so many actions in one game tick, while also needing to click accurately because of the way the inventory, prayers, and magic are managed.”

As a pro-tip for RuneScape players, Gray advises you to put on a song with 100 beats per minute and click to the beat while playing. Kendrick Lamar has a bunch of songs in that tempo, like “All the Stars” and “Not Like Us.” If you’re a music nerd, instead, just put a metronome at 100BPM.

This shows how rhythm can be part of successful games like NecroDancer in multiple ways, even if we’re not living in the rhythm game craze of the 2000s. 

“I think there will always be an audience that will crave new ways to interact with that music,” Gray said. “The creative innovation of devs in this genre will always amaze me.”