I’ve danced the mambo with minotaurs, the salsa with skeletons. I’ve done ballet with a banshee, the samba with a slime, and the waltz with wizards. I’ve disco-danced with dragons and danced the flamenco with fire spirits. They were beautiful dances, but a single misstep could’ve ended my life. Indeed it has done, many times.

This is Crypt of the Necrodancer, and your moves matter. Everything is done to the rhythm, if you fall away from it then you’ll be buried in a crypt of your own. It’s an exciting place, full of monsters and traps, and the music keeps on playing. You’d never see a lady dance with a dragon on Strictly Come Dancing.

This eternal dance begins after our heart is removed by a necromancer (sorry, *dancer). Our heart still beats, despite our blood running cold, and we have to keep to that beat. The necrodancer is a slavemaster when it comes to rhythm. You have to move around the dungeon, and attack, to the beat. Miss a beat and you stay still while the enemies move. The music can get pretty fast paced, so you need to think quickly.

Enemies won’t stop for you. They have their own movement patterns to go alongside their impeccable sense of timing. It forces you to balance the rhythm with their patterns, as you look for the best time to strike. This livens up the combat no end. Without the beat, the enemy patterns would be simple and rather stale. Add in the music and everything changes; you have to slow yourself down or speed yourself up. For me, it helped prevent it from feeling like a grind. Even the basic enemies are enjoyable because you’re taking them down on the beat.

Of course, a game like this is made or broken on its soundtrack. Not to worry though, because it’s fantastic. Danny Baranowsky proves once again why he’s one of my favourite composers. It’s personal preference of course, but it’s exactly the type of music I love. The shopkeeper joining in with deep, booming vocals is the icing on the cake. Necrodancer is split across four distinct zones, each with four levels, and there’s a different track for each. It helps differentiate the feeling of each zone, which complements the graphics nicely. The music also makes dying repeatedly a lot less annoying.

And there will be a lot of dying. This is a Roguelike after all, dying is part of the package. I’m quite fond of the genre myself and I feel that Necrodancer is definitely one of the more polished entries. The difficulty between zones ramps up naturally and there are a whole host of upgrades and items that make things different each run. It’s not gotten stale for me yet, especially with the ability to add in your own custom tracks, which changes the pace. I’d like to see more items complement the beat mechanic, but as it stands there’s a very solid pool.

Unfortunately, it does rather suffer from the same problem that lurks in the background of every roguelike; a dark gelatinous mass that’s destined to show up every time random chance is introduced in a video game. Once you introduce stronger items into the pool, it very much becomes based around what items drop, more so than skill level. It suffers most from this in All Zones mode, where you move through each zone in turn. If you haven’t got decent equipment by the end of Zone 1 then you’re going to be severely handicapped. You could pull it off with just a dagger, if you’re the type to practice it until six in the morning, but for me it feels like I’m fighting a brick wall. It’s an issue with the genre and thankfully Necrodancer suffers from it far less than say, The Binding of Isaac does.

Alongside that, I would also point towards the mini-bosses as something to work on. The problem lies in the variation. The mini-bosses show up in every level and have to be killed to open the staircase to the next one. The issue is that they don’t really change between zones. There are variations within them (there are three types of dragon, for example) but it’s not zone specific, so you could meet any of them in the first zone. The normal enemies fit the aesthetic of the zones brilliantly and even change up the gameplay. It feels a bit of wasted potential at the moment, given that each of the zones has been carefully designed to be as different as possible from each other.

Note that I pointed to it as something to work on, not as a set problem. The developers, Brave Yourself Games, have continually updated the game and kept us all aware of what’s changed. That kind of love for their game endears me to it more than any marketing could. You may look at that last paragraph and think the complaint petty: it is. I had to wrack my brains to think of something worth criticising that wasn’t just a foible of the genre.

Even when writing this review, I had to stop myself just booting up the game. I need to get screenshots for this and I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop playing it. The music that runs through it is too engrossing, I just want to move to it as I destroy another group of slimes. It combines good music with one of my favourite genres. That’s quite a hook. As the protagonist must dance to the rhythm of the Necrodancer, so must I. Pray that I do not miss the beat, there’s too many skeletons around for that.



Pros

-Beat system is great fun

-Music is fantastic

-The Zones differ in good ways

-Boss fights (not Mini-boss) are fun

-Hell of a lot of characters and a good number of items



Cons

-The RNG Bugbear

-Mini-bosses could use some variation



Crypt of the Necrodancer

Developer: Brace Yourself Games

Publisher: Brace Yourself Games, Klei Entertainment

Release Date: April 23rd 2015

Play it on: Windows, Mac, Linux (Steam)

