Remember Dance Dance Revolution, with its giant dance-pad controllers, pumping electronic soundtrack, and scrolling multicolored arrows? Imagine if someone brought it back from the dead, but the reanimation process went awry (as they so often do!) and it came back as a ghoulish dungeon crawler.
That's Crypt of the NecroDancer, and it's awesome.
The game, recently launched via Steam Early Access for PC, Mac, and Linux, is the *Dance Dance *dungeon crawler you never knew you always wanted. Like any standard roguelike, you explore a series of procedurally generated caverns, collecting equipment, gaining and abilities and slaying everything in your path. Reach the next level, things get harder, gear gets better, rinse and repeat.
The kicker is the game has just four buttons---each of them directional arrow keys---and you move or attack only on the beat of the game's pulsing electro-classical soundtrack. Miss the timing of a button press and your action doesn't register. Mess up the rhythm, and your coin multiplier resets.
Thankfully, enemies also move to the beat, usually in predictable patterns. This makes them easy to defeat in a one-on-one dance-off, but difficult to take down en masse. Weapon upgrades let you attack from a distance or hit multiple cells at once, giving you an upper hand over the undead dancing denizens of the crypt below.
The in-game soundtrack is great, though it can get repetitive if you're having trouble on a given level and thus listening to the same tune over and over. And over. If you want, you can swap these out with your own tunes.
While NecroDancer is more than enough fun using a computer keyboard, it's got a crazy fun dance pad mode---assuming you've still got a DDR pad that plugs into your PC. Dance pad mode has fewer, and easier, enemies, given that it's harder to jump around on the floor than tap a keyboard.
Then again, if you're still holding on to those giant foam monstrosities of directional-dancing days past, something tells me your skills will take the NecroDancer down anyway.
