The beat-matching classic returns in fine voice.
Someone recently told me that starters are the best parts of any restaurant menu. I heard that and realised that I agreed utterly, and that I had always agreed utterly. I realised that I had kind of known this forever.
Rhythm Paradise Groove review
- Developer: Nintendo TNX
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Platform: Played on Switch 2
- Availability: Out 2nd July on Switch and Switch 2.
Why? I think it’s because the starters are where the chefs can experiment a little. The plates are smaller, the ingredients cost is lower. And, crucially, there’s less expectation that what’s being served is the main event of the night. This means that what’s being served can actually be the true main event of the night: a bright burst of flavour and creativity and wonky thinking. Salted black cherry compote? Lamb cigars? I mean, I guess that sounds interesting… Cor!
To extend this idea a little bit, I feel that games like WarioWare and the Rhythm Paradise series have big starter energy. Rather than massive campaigns, with a twenty minute tutorial, unskippable cinematics and an open world the size of Montana, why not get into the action and out again in a few seconds? Catch the toast! Match the rhythm of the laundry machine! Got it? Done. Gone in three bites – a classic starter.
Here’s a Rhythm Paradise Groove trailer to show it in motion.Watch on YouTube
Rhythm Paradise Groove delivers on this premise with considerable joy. Once again, you’re up against a series of oddball scenarios in which you must time your inputs – button presses in this case – with the rhythm of whatever’s happening on the screen. Written down, it doesn’t sound like enough to keep a game going for very long, but that’s to misunderstand the magic of rhythms and beat-making.
From a handful of tones and rests and other musical terms I won’t pretend to understand, Rhythm Paradise Groove is able to conjure all kinds of sequences: You’re filming a car advert! Brake and accelerate in time with the music! You’re a crab playing volleyball with a snack! Raise both claws to avoid getting smacked on the head! You’re a robot working in a creme caramel factory! (Of course you are.) Catch the good puddings and zap the bad ‘uns with your laser eyes!
There are a lot of things to love about this. And one of them is that the game really encourages you to dial in and find the moments where you’re meant to press those buttons. To put it another way, you’re given cues and clues and indicators, but it’s generally never quite as straightforward as a blinking light telling you when to act and when to hold off. You need to come to understand the rhythm and the music yourself.
This makes the brief tutorials for each game arguably my favourite part of the whole thing. Music plays. An animated dog prepares to catch a Frisbee. I try to press the button on time – and it’s a miss. Another miss. A way-off miss. Then? Then I have to really think about the sounds I’m hearing, and also the sounds that maybe I’m not hearing. I have to count beats that, up until a second ago, I was barely even conscious of. There’s a sort of aural negative space effect going on in some of these games: I have to find the moment where everything actually happens. Sure, the animation is helping and the UI is helping, but really I need to come to some kind of personal understanding.
And this brings us to what I truly love about Rhythm Heaven Groove: it’s secretly about a number of things that are not really innately concerned with rhythm at all. This game is kind of about perception, I think. It’s about seeing something – or hearing something – and then learning how to really grasp what it’s actually about. Out of all these beats, which are the crucial ones? Out of all this animation, what are the key frames you have to match?
Through all this, it’s deeply concerned with the process of learning new things, of how repetition will only get you so far, and then something magical and wordless has to happen for everything to properly click – and for you to properly understand the timing of one of its games. There’s a game called Alien Alphabet here that is a perfect example of this. The alien talks and you have to press buttons to respond, but there are multiple prompts from the alien and multiple different responses you could offer. I was useless at this until I closed my eyes and just went by the sound effects. That was enough. That was what I had been missing.
And as a part of all this, the game’s also a window into just how easily I am distracted. A lot of the games evolve while you play, and some of them throw up little barriers to make following the rhythm more complicated from one moment to the next. The rhythm doesn’t change, but the visual cues drop out: the camera moves in too close, or something blocks the frame or the lights go out. In one of my favourite games, a helicopter appears in the sky now and then. Every time it does, I’m suddenly completely hopeless. I am besotted by the helicopter and I completely lose the thread of what I am supposed to be doing down on the ground.
(Add to this the fact that most games here contain a range of different inputs for different cues, so you learn one aspect of the game’s rhythm, and then you have to learn another, and switch back and forth as prompts dictate.)
I’ve made it sound a bit like a neurology exam – and I can confirm that it actually is a lot like a neurology exam, to be honest. But of course it’s also funny and surprising and endlessly generous. There are dozens of mini-games to work through, each set capped with a remix that jumbles together parts of different games into a medley. There are multiplayer challenges, played with separate Joy-Cons, one of which was so funny I thought we had lost my daughter for good and she would never stop laughing. There are medals to earn and optional challenges and doodads to unlock.
Image credit: Nintendo / Eurogamer
One of these, Beatspell, is really wonderful, incidentally. It’s a kind of scrolling RPG battle game in which you use different beats to unleash different spells on your opponents. There’s something of StreetPass Quest to it, and the way that the different spells slot their rhythms inside one another is genuinely magical.
Rhythm Paradise Groove accessibility options
Text-to-speech available throughout.
The funny thing about Rhythm Paradise Groove, and I’m realising this only as I’m typing, is that I don’t have that much to say about the soundtrack. There’s a lovely selection of pop tracks, I’m sure, and by the end of each mini-game I’m probably humming the theme, but they haven’t stuck in my mind yet because I’m still learning each game, which means I’m still inside the laboratory of their beats and rhythms.
This sounds like a diss – I played this music game and I can’t say much about the music – but it’s actually the opposite. This game gets me inside the music. It makes me pay attention. It makes me try to understand what’s actually going on.
A copy of Rhythm Paradise Groove was provided for this review by Nintendo.
