Sidequest #9 A Rock Steady Dance Floor - Allow Me To Gush Over "Crypt of the Necrodancer"

As cynical of a player as I am, every so often a game comes along that appeals to me on an almost primal level, as if it were made exclusively for me to enjoy. And though I expected that this year’s “me” game would be The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt (read: the game I’ve been waiting to play since I was literally 4 years-old), last month the folks at Brace Yourself Games pre-empted CD Projekt Red by concocting their own heroine-coated unicorn called Crypt of the Necrodancer.

By genre, it is a rogue-lite rhythm game: You descend a crypt by moving along a grid, fighting monsters and finding tools, in search of a staircase that will take you deeper down the dungeon. Every time you move one space or make an action, everything else moves as well. And when you die, you lose all the progress you made and have to restart the game mostly from scratch – you can find gems along the way that you can spend after dying to add items to the dungeon and increase your base health total among other things. Standard rogue-lite faire.

But, unlike in a typical rogue-like where the player can stop and think in between making a move, in Crypt of the Necrodancer you can only move in time with the beat of the background music. If you miss a beat, then the enemies will continue to move/act/pelvic thrust at you in time with the music. As one would expect, this little tweak makes the game exceptionally more challenging from a skill perspective than classic rogue-likes, since thinking quickly is just as important as thinking clearly. However, the devs compensated for the game’s potentially absurd difficulty (more on this later) by making it more “fair” in ways that defy the standards set by both of its composing genres.

You thought that pelvic thrust crack
was a joke didn't you?

No Rhythm? No Problem

You don’t actually have to act exactly in time with the beat. If you’re close(-ish), you’ll be fine most of the time. According to the lead programmer Ryan Clark, rhythmic inaccuracies were allowed to make the game, “extremely challenging without frustrating the player. Each death is the result of a lack of knowledge (‘Oh, I didn’t know that those faces would shoot arrows at me! Now I know!’) or a lack of skill. Gaining the necessary knowledge or skill is entirely in the hands of the player.” Functionally, this makes the rhythmic component act more like a very short turn timer, rather than an unyielding metronome. There’s even an item in the game called a pace-maker har har har that further marginalizes this by letting you move as quickly as you like (though I still wouldn’t recommend playing off the beat, since it makes enemy movement a little too spastic).

Hit The Dance Studio

To further corroborate Clark’s statement, the game also features numerous ways for players to teach themselves, its nuances. Throughout the game’s first three levels are NPCs that, once freed from their prison cells, will allow the player to practice using the various weapons and fighting specific enemies. Most of these trainings involve simply fighting a single endlessly spawning enemy using different weapons, though some of the regiments on dungeon survival (particularly dragon defense) present a puzzle for players to figure out. Note however, that in order to train against an enemy, a player must first have encountered one during the standard game. I presume that this is to retain the sense of discovery and experimentation upon seeing an enemy for the first time, yet thankfully it never veers into the realm of BS because of the following design decision:

The ground also lights up like a dance floor whenever
you take out enemies without taking damage

One Album At A Time

This game is broken up into four distinct zones each containing three levels that culminate in a random boss fight. Upon completing a level however, one is not transported to the next one, but back to the lobby. This of course, constitutes a loss of all gear and stat boosts, thus forcing players to start each zone from scratch. But, the player can also select and play any zone they have unlocked via the lobby, so this isn’t actually a penalty. It makes the first level of each zone comparatively difficult since one always has to start it with nothing but a dagger, but the aforementioned balancing mechanisms coupled with the player’s ability to permanently increase their base health ensure that the enemies are never capable of immediately killing player in a single hit.

Also, bear in mind that excluding (boss battles) the songs are not on a loop; they are all roughly 2:30-3:00 minutes long, and when they end the player is dropped into the next stage. So, even if on some off chance a player gets completely screwed over by the enemies or doesn’t feel like continuing to explore the levels, she has the option to simply wait until the song ends to skip the level. Again, I wouldn’t recommend doing this, since it takes the fun out of the game and the bosses are specifically designed to be difficult to fight with the base dagger, but it is a legitimate option. Collectively, this ensures that no standard play session lasts for an excessive amount of time preventing any sort of fatigue from impairing one’s abilities.

The RNG Gods Smile Upon Thee

Unlike most rogue-likes, Crypt of the Necrodancer does not contain any unavoidable “screw you” scenarios. There are no rooms that throw an incalculable amount of monsters at the player or enemies that can only be beaten with a specific weapon. Any penalties within the gameplay, such as taking damage for moving backwards, is imposed by the player and comes with a perk of some description. Additionally, the game is very realistically beatable using only the starting dagger. All enemies save for bosses, mini-bosses, and ooze golems can be taken out in mere moments with skillful play. The game’s divided structure then further facilitates this by necessitating that players become comfortable playing the game without any items. So, considering that in a normal play session, the items are usually acquired within 20-30 seconds of each other, the game creates a facsimile of a positive feedback loop constantly rewarding the player for their continued survival rather than occasionally punishing them for no apparent reason (like SOME games).

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The listed adherences to fairness undoubtedly helped this game succeed critically where similar titles fell flat. However, I am almost certain that this was also in no small part due to the game’s outstanding soundtrack and comprehensive gameplay options.

BTW This Is Also A Legitimate Rogue-Like

Despite the deliberate decision to design the game as a Rogue-lite with short levels and persistent

You can even capture replays of your playthroughs to share with friends

player unlocks, players also have the option to play through all of the game’s stages in succession with everything unlocked except for the extended starting health bar. The strength of the enemies and price of items are noticeably increased from the main game to prevent everything beyond the first level from being too easy, and players do not earn anything that assists them in the standard game. Basically, this converts the game into a true Rogue-like and provides another personal test for players who find the standard 12~minute play sessions to be too short.

The inclusion of this mode also permitted several other rogue-like specific features like daily marathon rushes that are scored on an online leaderboard, and seeded level layouts that enable players to replay and share dungeon layouts that they find amusing or noteworthy. So even the standard game need not be played should players prefer a more “hardcore” experience. Speaking of which, the game also confers other structural means of satisfying this same desire.

This Beat Don’t Stop For Nuthin’

As was previously stated, the speed of the game is dictated by the beat of the music. So to emphasize the beat and liberate the player from focusing on the music, the standard soundtrack consists of EDM tracks that match the aesthetic theme of the level and very gradually increase in tempo on each subsequent level, with one notable exception in the randomly placed Death Metal boss fight. This is one of those rare video game soundtracks that is so good that I'd recommend it even if one has zero interest in playing the game (and is available here *wink wink, nudge nudge*).

But, if general EDM isn’t your cup of tea, there are also two other versions of the soundtrack, one dubstep and the other heavy metal built into the game that you can use instead. Danny Baranowsky’s composition remains intact on the remixes so the beat is still incredibly pronounced and easy to play along to. But, if those don’t appeal to you either, you can forgo using any of the in-game soundtracks and play along to your own music. Because of the breadth of connections music has to the gameplay of Crypt of the Necrodancer, however, this seemingly innocuous feature common amongst games, carries a laundry list of cascading implications. Since this is only a Sidequest and not a Mini-map let’s just focus on one: player adjustable difficulty.

The ability to select both the level and the soundtrack of the game allows player to select low BPM songs from their collection in order to extend the time available to them to make decisions. In doing so, one can become deeply acquainted with a new level and progress through the game with relative ease, should the standard progression prove too difficult. Those masochists individuals like me however, can also raise the difficulty of the game by selecting high and or irregular BPM tracks. And more importantly players can also choose longer tracks than the typical three-minute fair if they would like to explore levels more freely. More broadly though, possessing the ability to freely adjust the soundtrack to this game further extends the game’s already extreme replayability, without squeezing more money out of the player. So if it wasn’t clear enough by the adherence to minimizing in-game BS and emphasis on creating an individually adjustable gameplay, I’ll say it plainly: this is what humane game-design looks like.

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*Since I’ve been having an insane amount of fun playing this game with the custom soundtrack, I figured that I would share my own personal selection of tracks that I’ve found fun to play along to. They mirror the standard gameplay progression, so they aren’t excessively difficult, but they are longer than the in-game selection so you can’t just wait out the clock to beat a level. Also, a handful of these come from OCReMix and are thus free to download.

For those interested in using the Custom Soundtrack function, it’s worth remembering that the beat determines the difficulty, not the rhythm. A fast song with lots of notes is not necessarily a challenging song to play to. For the sake of your sanity you should also generally pick songs that have a clearly identifiable and moderately paced beat [T-Swift does not quite meet this game's BSQ (Booty-Shaking Quotient)]. And lastly the software the game uses is not infallible and has a tendency to chart the downbeat instead of the actual beat, so you may have to manually set the beat if it comes out…off. But with all that said, dance on and stay funky, my friends.*

Lobby: “The Final View”- Nujabes

1-1: “Vampire Snap” – Joshua Morse

1-2: “Dynamite” – Jamiroquai

1-3: “D.A.N.C.E.” – Justice

King Conga: “Welcome to the Funky House” – djpretzel

2-1: “Chemixtrixx” – PrototypeRaptor

2-2: “Feel Good INC.” –Gorillaz

2-3: “Around the World”– Daft Punk

Coral Riff: “Dry?” – JanneDa Arc

3-1: “Forgotten (FZEdit)” – Scattle

3-2: “Siren Synapse” – Alexander Brandon & Jimmy Hinson

3-3: “Armored Beetle (ArmoredArmadillo vs. Gravity Beetle)” – Txai

Death Metal: “Dolla-DaggaBuzz-Buzz Ziggety-Zag” – Marilyn Manson

4-1: “Colossus” - Zircon

4-2: “The Pretender” –Infected Mushroom

4-3: “Sweet Harmony (Ft.Liquid)” - Danny Byrd

Deep Blues: “JazzHouse” – Naoto Tanaka
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*NOTE: Since the Steam screencap function was borked for this game, all screenshots displayed are from around the web. I will be changing them in the near future, so do not be alarmed if this page suddenly looks very different.*


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