Indie games, much like any other development area of videogames, have a bit of a reputation towards trends and a constant glut of similar genre games, attempting to capitalize on – or, if you're more of a cynic, cash in on – whatever genre is popular at the time. Once it was odd, short games like The Graveyard. Other times it was games about building and open-world exploration, like Minecraft and its ilk. And then sometimes it was zombies and less blocky, more “realistic” survival games.
More recently, games with roguelike elements have come into their own, oftentimes combined with other genres to provide a fresh twist on a less niche formula. Spelunky added roguelike elements to a platformer. FTL was a game about space travel and strategic ship battles. Rogue Legacy was a roguelike Metroidvania. And while the combination of roguelikes with other genres helped to keep the roguelike aspects fresh in some ways, it always made me wonder how long it would last. Many of these games have roguelike elements, but are much heavier on whatever other genre the roguelike was combined with. As someone who thoroughly enjoys roguelikes, I was always curious to see whether or not a game that used another genre to accentuate the roguelike, rather than the other way around, would ever come out, especially since “roguelike elements” is starting to become a point of derision recently.
Crypt of the Necrodancer, thankfully, helped to fill that gap for me. Initially playable last year in an early access phase, the full game was released in April of 2015 for the PC. The game is a rhythm-based, turn-based roguelike, where the player has to perform their actions to the beat of the game's background music, whether they're navigating the dungeon, attacking enemies, using items, collecting equipment or casting spells. When put into words, the concept is rather simple, and it is indeed easy to grasp for newcomers, but the game manages to shine thanks to the rest of the elements working in harmony with the rhythm-based turns.
The game starts off without much ado, using a brief introductory cutscene to introduce the premise: a young girl named Cadance enters a graveyard, shovel in hand, but the earth opens up under her feet, causing her to plummet underground and, rather abruptly, die when her head hits a rock. However, during her brief death, a strange sorceror appears from nowhere, steals Cadance's heart, and disappears, not only reviving her, but cursing her heart to beat to music. Between the game's four different “zones”, cutscenes will play, but the story as a whole is mostly inconsequential; you can even turn the cutscenes off if you wish, and it may be a good idea, as they can cause crashes for some folks.
After this, the game swiftly moves on to a beat checker and a tutorial for new installations. The tutorial is thankfully quite short and to the point, only providing the absolute essentials of gameplay and keeping the majority of other tricks and abilities tucked away for later, and after the tutorial, the game immediately sets you on your first run through Zone 1. It's most likely that new players will end up dying at some point during this first expedition into the crypt, upon which they'll be plunked down into the game's lobby, which serves as a cross between a hub level and a main menu for various functions, like heading back into the dungeon or changing your character.
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Outmaneuvering your enemies is the key to progress... as long as you don't have two left feet!
The game has ten playable characters accessible from part of the lobby, each with their own little gimmicks that make them stand out from Cadance: one has infinite bombs and can kick them, but never finds normal weapons. Another is a pacifist that can't use weapons and can only confuse enemies. One of the later characters moves in double-time, taking two turns for each beat. The rest of the lobby's functions are much more interesting, and even though similarities could be drawn between them and some other indie roguelikes, I think the way they've been implemented works very well. The player can find diamonds while out crawling, and these serve as currency for the lobby shops, letting the player buy new items to appear in the dungeon's zones, or to buy permanent upgrades, like extra heart containers or a permanent increase to their coin multiplier.
However, these only affect single-zone runs – the player can either choose to start from Zone 1 and go through the whole dungeon (which automatically unlocks every item and spell, but starts the player off without their health or coin upgrades), or to play just one zone instead. This helps to keep pressure off of players in some ways: new players or players still wanting to unlock stuff or practice can play a single zone, while experienced crawlers can try running all zones or attempt self-imposed challenges.
Rogue Legacy had a similar setup, unlocking new classes and upgrading player health, magic and abilities the further they went, but one of my criticisms of that game is that this sort of made the game feel like it got easier over time. Crypt of the Necrodancer, on the other hand, manages to avoid that thanks to a constant, sensible escalation of many of its enemies, hazards and even its music, in a rather subtle and clever way. Even the visuals tie into this, with good spriting, charming animation and small words of text easily helping to illustrate and help players understand without much trouble.
For instance, the first zone has water tiles that the player can sink in when traversed. The player must take a beat to climb out, and then the water becomes normal terrain. The second zone has mud instead, which never disappears and is slow to navigate across. Then hot coals that damage the player if stood on or walked across without stepping on a normal tile before and after each, or ice that makes the player slide in whatever direction they stepped towards, or magic tiles that shrink the player, leaving them unable to do anything and extremely vulnerable to damage.
One of the smartest aspects of the game is how the player must defeat a miniboss or perform some sort of task in order to unlock the stairs leading to the next floor. Each floor of the dungeon has its little hidden secrets, chests, and always a shop for the player to find, but the layouts are always very compacted, leaving enough room to explore or breathe without feeling too linear or too big. However, if the player could simply rush to the stairs without any prerequisites, it would be too easy to simply bum-rush the game. Having the minibosses is a smart way to encourage the player to explore and find weapons, gold and items in order to stock up and equip themselves for the rest of the dungeon, especially in preparation for the bosses encountered at the end of each zone.
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The bosses in particular can be deviously creative, ranging from an ape running a conga line to a half-aquatic half-instrument monster that actively plays its own background music.
Of course, it's impossible to talk about the game without discussing the rhythm aspect, and put plainly, the game would not be anywhere near worth talking about without this little quirk. That's not to say that it's bad without the rhythm aspect – the game even has a Bard character that doesn't have the rhythm requirement, turning the game into a normal turn-based roguelike. In fact, I'd even say that playing as the Bard early on is a good way to dip your feet into the game for that very reason.
But because of how moving and playing to the beat forces the player to constantly stay on their toes, Crypt of the Necrodancer becomes more than the sum of its parts. Unlike other rhythm games, which are mostly about memorizing a pattern of inputs to play to a song, Crypt of the Necrodancer has multiple things that the player has to keep track of. The player needs to dance through the dungeon, read enemy patterns, mull over whether to buy that certain item or not, use bombs, navigate around traps and hazards, all while performing every action within a very short timeframe. Everything in the game, from the music, to the enemies, to the dungeons, even the sounds and animations, are designed to work in sync with the rhythm. If they hadn't, if it had just been a normal turn-based game, it wouldn't work nearly as well.
Unfortunately, that's where one of the big problems I have with the game comes in: the music and rhythm gameplay is great, and the soundtrack is one of the highlights, but at times it just doesn't quite gel, both in terms of actual gameplay and in terms of side activities. Admittedly, it's unfair of me to harp on the game for the former due to the heavier emphasis on the roguelike part of it, but sometimes, when I don't have a strong weapon to fight enemies with and I don't have enough room to maneuver, when I end up surrounded and completely unable to escape, it becomes grating. Most deaths in the game are easy to trace back to a misstep or a wrong move under the pressure of the beat, but sometimes a failed run can feel more cheap than anything else.
The problem I have with the side activities and the music is that, sad to say, the custom music option leaves a lot to be desired. Being able to “play with your own MP3s” was something advertised during one of the game's trailers, and it was something I was really intrigued to test out, but when I tried it, it felt very clunky. It should come as no surprise that attempting to use music without a consistent or steady beat won't work, but many of the songs that did have a consistent beat that I tried didn't seem to take to the beat detector as well as they ideally should have.
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There's nothing quite as welcome as the sight of a shop's golden walls, or the sound of the shopkeeper's amusingly wide vocal range.
It wasn't an enormous flaw, since the beat detector was fairly accurate... but when trying to play with 'Battlefield – Storm', or 'Mount Horn', it became clear very quickly that the beats, while close, were just off enough to not match up, making the game very irritating to play. I'm not sure whether it's because of the MP3s I'm using, the songs themselves, or my game's beat calibration, but something about it just doesn't work. It's a shame, considering how much appeal the idea can have for players. However, the game does have support for other custom modifications, such as changing the sprites or tilesets, and since these are purely visual and not quite as technical, the visual mods for the game tend to work much better.
However, these are mostly minor gripes, things that aren't necessary to truly enjoy the game, and in all honesty the game is so enjoyable to play that it's easy to ignore the custom music and, after the initial sting, shrug off the occasional annoying death and keep on playing. Crypt of the Necrodancer manages to take a roguelike and turn it into a surprisingly fresh experience thanks to its rhythm gameplay, charming design and excellent tunes. If you've been itching for a crawler that's easy to pick up and play for a few minutes or for an hour or few, this is certainly worth the time.
More recently, games with roguelike elements have come into their own, oftentimes combined with other genres to provide a fresh twist on a less niche formula. Spelunky added roguelike elements to a platformer. FTL was a game about space travel and strategic ship battles. Rogue Legacy was a roguelike Metroidvania. And while the combination of roguelikes with other genres helped to keep the roguelike aspects fresh in some ways, it always made me wonder how long it would last. Many of these games have roguelike elements, but are much heavier on whatever other genre the roguelike was combined with. As someone who thoroughly enjoys roguelikes, I was always curious to see whether or not a game that used another genre to accentuate the roguelike, rather than the other way around, would ever come out, especially since “roguelike elements” is starting to become a point of derision recently.
Crypt of the Necrodancer, thankfully, helped to fill that gap for me. Initially playable last year in an early access phase, the full game was released in April of 2015 for the PC. The game is a rhythm-based, turn-based roguelike, where the player has to perform their actions to the beat of the game's background music, whether they're navigating the dungeon, attacking enemies, using items, collecting equipment or casting spells. When put into words, the concept is rather simple, and it is indeed easy to grasp for newcomers, but the game manages to shine thanks to the rest of the elements working in harmony with the rhythm-based turns.
The game starts off without much ado, using a brief introductory cutscene to introduce the premise: a young girl named Cadance enters a graveyard, shovel in hand, but the earth opens up under her feet, causing her to plummet underground and, rather abruptly, die when her head hits a rock. However, during her brief death, a strange sorceror appears from nowhere, steals Cadance's heart, and disappears, not only reviving her, but cursing her heart to beat to music. Between the game's four different “zones”, cutscenes will play, but the story as a whole is mostly inconsequential; you can even turn the cutscenes off if you wish, and it may be a good idea, as they can cause crashes for some folks.
After this, the game swiftly moves on to a beat checker and a tutorial for new installations. The tutorial is thankfully quite short and to the point, only providing the absolute essentials of gameplay and keeping the majority of other tricks and abilities tucked away for later, and after the tutorial, the game immediately sets you on your first run through Zone 1. It's most likely that new players will end up dying at some point during this first expedition into the crypt, upon which they'll be plunked down into the game's lobby, which serves as a cross between a hub level and a main menu for various functions, like heading back into the dungeon or changing your character.
Outmaneuvering your enemies is the key to progress... as long as you don't have two left feet!
The game has ten playable characters accessible from part of the lobby, each with their own little gimmicks that make them stand out from Cadance: one has infinite bombs and can kick them, but never finds normal weapons. Another is a pacifist that can't use weapons and can only confuse enemies. One of the later characters moves in double-time, taking two turns for each beat. The rest of the lobby's functions are much more interesting, and even though similarities could be drawn between them and some other indie roguelikes, I think the way they've been implemented works very well. The player can find diamonds while out crawling, and these serve as currency for the lobby shops, letting the player buy new items to appear in the dungeon's zones, or to buy permanent upgrades, like extra heart containers or a permanent increase to their coin multiplier.
However, these only affect single-zone runs – the player can either choose to start from Zone 1 and go through the whole dungeon (which automatically unlocks every item and spell, but starts the player off without their health or coin upgrades), or to play just one zone instead. This helps to keep pressure off of players in some ways: new players or players still wanting to unlock stuff or practice can play a single zone, while experienced crawlers can try running all zones or attempt self-imposed challenges.
Rogue Legacy had a similar setup, unlocking new classes and upgrading player health, magic and abilities the further they went, but one of my criticisms of that game is that this sort of made the game feel like it got easier over time. Crypt of the Necrodancer, on the other hand, manages to avoid that thanks to a constant, sensible escalation of many of its enemies, hazards and even its music, in a rather subtle and clever way. Even the visuals tie into this, with good spriting, charming animation and small words of text easily helping to illustrate and help players understand without much trouble.
For instance, the first zone has water tiles that the player can sink in when traversed. The player must take a beat to climb out, and then the water becomes normal terrain. The second zone has mud instead, which never disappears and is slow to navigate across. Then hot coals that damage the player if stood on or walked across without stepping on a normal tile before and after each, or ice that makes the player slide in whatever direction they stepped towards, or magic tiles that shrink the player, leaving them unable to do anything and extremely vulnerable to damage.
One of the smartest aspects of the game is how the player must defeat a miniboss or perform some sort of task in order to unlock the stairs leading to the next floor. Each floor of the dungeon has its little hidden secrets, chests, and always a shop for the player to find, but the layouts are always very compacted, leaving enough room to explore or breathe without feeling too linear or too big. However, if the player could simply rush to the stairs without any prerequisites, it would be too easy to simply bum-rush the game. Having the minibosses is a smart way to encourage the player to explore and find weapons, gold and items in order to stock up and equip themselves for the rest of the dungeon, especially in preparation for the bosses encountered at the end of each zone.
The bosses in particular can be deviously creative, ranging from an ape running a conga line to a half-aquatic half-instrument monster that actively plays its own background music.
Of course, it's impossible to talk about the game without discussing the rhythm aspect, and put plainly, the game would not be anywhere near worth talking about without this little quirk. That's not to say that it's bad without the rhythm aspect – the game even has a Bard character that doesn't have the rhythm requirement, turning the game into a normal turn-based roguelike. In fact, I'd even say that playing as the Bard early on is a good way to dip your feet into the game for that very reason.
But because of how moving and playing to the beat forces the player to constantly stay on their toes, Crypt of the Necrodancer becomes more than the sum of its parts. Unlike other rhythm games, which are mostly about memorizing a pattern of inputs to play to a song, Crypt of the Necrodancer has multiple things that the player has to keep track of. The player needs to dance through the dungeon, read enemy patterns, mull over whether to buy that certain item or not, use bombs, navigate around traps and hazards, all while performing every action within a very short timeframe. Everything in the game, from the music, to the enemies, to the dungeons, even the sounds and animations, are designed to work in sync with the rhythm. If they hadn't, if it had just been a normal turn-based game, it wouldn't work nearly as well.
Unfortunately, that's where one of the big problems I have with the game comes in: the music and rhythm gameplay is great, and the soundtrack is one of the highlights, but at times it just doesn't quite gel, both in terms of actual gameplay and in terms of side activities. Admittedly, it's unfair of me to harp on the game for the former due to the heavier emphasis on the roguelike part of it, but sometimes, when I don't have a strong weapon to fight enemies with and I don't have enough room to maneuver, when I end up surrounded and completely unable to escape, it becomes grating. Most deaths in the game are easy to trace back to a misstep or a wrong move under the pressure of the beat, but sometimes a failed run can feel more cheap than anything else.
The problem I have with the side activities and the music is that, sad to say, the custom music option leaves a lot to be desired. Being able to “play with your own MP3s” was something advertised during one of the game's trailers, and it was something I was really intrigued to test out, but when I tried it, it felt very clunky. It should come as no surprise that attempting to use music without a consistent or steady beat won't work, but many of the songs that did have a consistent beat that I tried didn't seem to take to the beat detector as well as they ideally should have.
There's nothing quite as welcome as the sight of a shop's golden walls, or the sound of the shopkeeper's amusingly wide vocal range.
It wasn't an enormous flaw, since the beat detector was fairly accurate... but when trying to play with 'Battlefield – Storm', or 'Mount Horn', it became clear very quickly that the beats, while close, were just off enough to not match up, making the game very irritating to play. I'm not sure whether it's because of the MP3s I'm using, the songs themselves, or my game's beat calibration, but something about it just doesn't work. It's a shame, considering how much appeal the idea can have for players. However, the game does have support for other custom modifications, such as changing the sprites or tilesets, and since these are purely visual and not quite as technical, the visual mods for the game tend to work much better.
However, these are mostly minor gripes, things that aren't necessary to truly enjoy the game, and in all honesty the game is so enjoyable to play that it's easy to ignore the custom music and, after the initial sting, shrug off the occasional annoying death and keep on playing. Crypt of the Necrodancer manages to take a roguelike and turn it into a surprisingly fresh experience thanks to its rhythm gameplay, charming design and excellent tunes. If you've been itching for a crawler that's easy to pick up and play for a few minutes or for an hour or few, this is certainly worth the time.