Rift of the NecroDancer

Crypt of the NecroDancer built its reputation on a strange, brilliant hybrid: a roguelike dungeon crawler where every move had to land on the beat. Rift of the NecroDancer, released on Steam by Brace Yourself Games and Tic Toc Studios on 5 February 2025, takes that DNA and flips the emphasis -- it's a dedicated rhythm game first, with the roguelike's monster-encounter structure repurposed as the note chart itself. It sits at Very Positive, 94% across 3,054 reviews, on the strength of an idea that reviewers across the sample agree is genuinely novel -- and a specific, well-documented minority report about where that idea runs into trouble.

Monsters as notes -- a real reinvention, not a reskin

The pitch is simple to state and, several reviewers note, harder than it sounds to actually design well: instead of notes falling down lanes toward a hit line, monsters approach you across three lanes, each with a distinct movement and attack pattern you learn to read and counter on the beat. "Crypt of the Necrodancer broke the boundaries of what a rhythm game could look and function like," reads one review, "Rift of the Necrodancer puts everything created outside of those boundaries back inside of them and it's fantastic." Reviewers describe the sensation in strikingly consistent terms once the system clicks -- "the most insane flowstate ever," reads one; "just one more song and then I can stop for a bit," reads another, in a loop, from a reviewer with over 200 hours logged. One review, at over 1,000 hours played, calls it simply "my new favourite rhythm game."

That's an unusually strong engagement signal for a genre where burnout is common, and it's backed by structural support: a Steam Workshop level editor lets the community build and share custom charts, extending play well past the built-in setlist for players who stick around -- several reviewers specifically credit the custom-chart community as a reason they're still playing months after launch.

Where it loses people: legibility, not difficulty

The negative sample -- a real but comparatively small 183 of 3,054 total reviews -- converges on a specific complaint that's worth taking seriously precisely because it comes from self-identified rhythm-game veterans rather than genre newcomers put off by any challenge. As difficulty rises, the number of simultaneous monster types and variants a player has to track climbs with it, and for a consistent minority, that crosses from "hard" into "unreadable." "It's a reading nightmare on the higher difficulties," writes one reviewer who otherwise recommends the game; "I find this game really difficult to read," writes another, ultimately refunding it despite genre experience with the original Crypt of the NecroDancer. A third, more technical complaint concerns timing precision specifically: "in no other rhythm game has the judgement system for the timing been this sporadically whimsical," reads one, describing repeated recalibration attempts that never quite resolved the issue.

There's a genre-identity thread running underneath these complaints too. Several reviewers argue the game is, at heart, "a combat game set to a rhythm" rather than a true rhythm game in the traditional falling-notes sense, and that the monster-memorization structure asks players to learn discrete enemy behaviours rather than read continuous musical patterns the way genre veterans are used to. Whether that's a flaw or simply a different kind of rhythm game is genuinely split across the review sample -- plenty of reviewers frame the same observation as the game's most interesting idea rather than its biggest problem.

A DLC catalogue that adds up fast

The other concrete, checkable complaint concerns pricing, and the numbers back it up. The base game costs NZ$28.99. Layered on top of that are 17 separately priced music DLC packs -- licensed crossovers with Undertale, Hatsune Miku, Celeste, Shovel Knight, K/DA, Monstercat, Pizza Tower, Friday Night Funkin', hololive, Among Us, Everhood and VA-11 Hall-A among them -- which together total roughly NZ$175.65 if bought individually at full price, more than six times the base game's own cost. "Rift is starting to feel like a DLC farm game more than anything," reads one review from a long-time fan of the developer, who goes on to argue newer paid map packs feel worse-designed than the free content bundled at launch. Another is blunter: "the dlc is very expensive... if the dlc costs more than the main game, we have a problem." To be fair to the model, these are licensed music packs -- Brace Yourself Games is paying for the rights to Toby Fox's or Hatsune Miku's music on each one, a real cost structure different from a typical cosmetic DLC -- but the cumulative price tag is a legitimate thing to know going in, and it's not a complaint reviewers are inventing out of nothing.

Verdict

7.5 out of 10. Rift of the NecroDancer does something genuinely new with a genre that doesn't reinvent itself often, and the vast majority of its audience -- reviewers logging hundreds to thousands of hours, an active custom-chart Workshop scene, 94% positive across three thousand reviews -- say it works. The complaints that keep it from scoring higher here are specific and real rather than vague: a legibility ceiling that turns some of its harder charts into memorization tests for genre veterans used to reading music rather than monster behaviour, and a DLC catalogue that, if you chase it all, costs several times what the excellent base game does. Buy it for the base game and the setlist you actually care about, not the whole shelf, and it's an easy recommendation for anyone who wants to see a familiar genre do something it hasn't done before.