I’ve been a rhythm game fiend since my introduction to Dance Dance Revolution in the early 2000s. I spent years obsessed with DDR, took a detour into Beatmania, then played Guitar Hero / Rock Band nonstop for years.

I haven’t gone deep on any rhythm games recently, but I check in on the genre from time to time. 2025 was a fascinating year because three rhythm games were released that were different from any I’ve played before.

Ostensibly, these games still operate in the same way as every other rhythm game: press the right buttons at the right time. But here’s the catch: these games intentionally obfuscate which buttons you’re supposed to press and when.

That’s a vast departure from standard rhythm games, which usually have a line which shows you exactly when to press certain buttons. By diverging from this formula, these games are more stylish, but also derive much of their difficulty from the illegibility of the note chart.

Rift of the Necrodancer

At first glance, Rift of the Necrodancer looks like your standard DDR clone: there’s three directions (left, right, center) and you press the corresponding direction when there’s an enemy on it:

The twist is that almost every enemy does something tricky. Some enemies take more than one hit to defeat. Some enemies switch lanes. Some enemies move faster than others. Some even turn into other enemies upon defeat. Plus, there are various traps that further alter the ways enemies move.

The end result is a chaotic game where the difficulty isn’t so much in “pressing buttons in time” but “figure out when to press which buttons.”

Rhythm Doctor

Rhythm Doctor is fascinating because there’s only a single button to press, but when you press it is the challenge.

It starts off simple enough: press the button on the 7th beat. But for such a simple concept, Rhythm Doctor goes off the rails quickly. The first level has tempo changes & off-beats. Subsequently, every couple levels a new twist is introduced: silent beats, swing beats, holds, syncopation, subdivision, blast beats, etc. You can also have multiple characters doing different rhythms at the same time:

I almost gave up on level 1-XN because the latter half drops all visual and auditory cues (instead, you have to rely on your internal metronome):

Unbeatable

Unbeatable sits somewhere between the other two games.

On the one hand, it only has two buttons to press (up or down), so it’s simple like Rhythm Doctor. On the other hand, it’s got the chart note obfuscation of Rift of the Necrodancer, with notes you have to dodge, notes you have to hit more than once, etc. On top of all that, it splits the lanes in two different directions, which can make it hard to determine which note is coming next.

Full disclosure, I only played an old demo of Unbeatable after a friend suggested I try it (for purposes of writing this article).

My Take

Personally, I am not a fan of this subgenre. For me, rhythm games are all about dexterity - a skill challenge, not an intellectual one. Purposefully obfuscating what I need to do is more frustrating than it is fun. It's like trying to play John Cage's "Concert for Piano and Orchestra".

For all these games, one could “unroll” their complications, converting their obfuscation into simple note charts. There’s nothing stopping you from creating sheet music to beat these games; instead of “hit skeleton twice”, you would “press 'up' for two eighth notes.”

Is this the birth of a new subgenre of rhythm games, or have these sorts of rhythm games always existed? The only other example I could find was A Dance of Fire and Ice (released in 2019). Strange that 2025 had so many of them released at once.