The middle octave is an integral part of songwriting that I really enjoy, sometimes referred to as a piece of music’s “meanwhile, back to the pasture” moment. The song has established a structure by this point, and we’ve been listening happily to it for a few minutes. We know the verse, we know the chorus. We usually know what to expect – or we think we do. Then, suddenly we were somewhere else. choir. Angel. Elvis is drying the tears from our eyes. A familiar theme, but now it’s weird and upside down. Slow down, speed up, twist yourself. at the same time? Oh yes, that’s what’s happening with the ranch.
I like this description of the middle 8 almost as much as I like a good middle 8 itself. I like it because it shows that a song is a journey, and as we listen to it unfold, we are beside it, covering the ground within it. We were a little surprised that the ground we covered changed when the middle eight arrived.
Not every song has a middle eight, and not every song needs one. But I think about them a lot when playing Rytmos, a game where each piece of music is a path you draw through the landscape. The paths are truly mazes. Often these mazes take the form of a figure-of-eight, which I think is a nice accidental harmony. However, “eight” itself is not important. What matters — or what feels important when I’m immersed in this magical, teleporting, mind-expanding game is the loop in the number eight. In fact, the song starts somewhere and goes back to where it started—but it returns to where it started in an unexpected direction.
Rytmos is a musical puzzle game. I started playing it on PC and then moved to Switch because I realized it was something that required me to lean forward into the screen. It needs to be held in the hand. It requires the tangibility and special imagination that handheld games encourage. The idea is simple. Each level will give you a starting point and some nearby towers sticking out of the ground. You coax a line from the starting point and try to connect it with the tower, then go back to the starting point again to finish.
Because Rytmos is a puzzle game, there are rules: the line will travel in the direction you choose until it hits an obstacle, and while it can pass through itself, it can only end at the starting point. Because Rytmos is a music game, each tower the line passes through triggers a sound, which plays on the soundtrack. The more towers you hit, the more sounds you trigger, and when you go to the next level of the suite, the sounds you triggered in the previous level can still be heard. When you play through a series of levels, you’re basically building a track, playing a game that feels part instrument and part sequencer. In fact, it really feels like finding the music as your line tugs through the magical waters, connecting one sparkling, twitching sound after another.
Listen: Rytmos is a great puzzle game. One of the best I’ve ever played. This is partly because of the complexity of each level set – one will spread ice blocks across the playing field that you have to move back and forth to find a path for your line, and another may have teleporters that can point your line from one to the other. One, while maintaining direction and momentum.
Rytmos has a lot of these ideas, but it keeps them fun rather than irritating. In other words, it gets complicated, but it never fails to give you a puzzle that won’t succumb to curiosity and experimentation.
why is it like this? I think this is because the complexity of the game is ultimately filtered through the fact that you can move lines in four directions, and some of those directions will inevitably be non-starters. You can be logical, and over the course of Rytmos, I’ve come to recognize useful spaces in the landscape—such as spaces that tell me a turn is possible or impossible—but really, with these four options, the solution to tough problems The approach is usually to just head off in a different direction. So Rytmos to me is very much like an unspoken, mindless solution to a problem that I can only solve by taking a walk.
Geoff Dyer once said that even with the best poetry, the most you want to hear is, “I’ll read two more poems.” And – whisper it – that’s what puzzle games are sometimes: I appreciate the brilliance, but I also often look forward to looking back at having played the thing, if that makes sense. Sometimes it’s easier to enjoy a bright idea in principle and in memory than in practice and in the moment. Anyway, that’s not how I feel about Rytmos. I’m actually a little sad every time a puzzle is solved because they’re just making a path that’s so much fun. Again, you can solve them with logic, but also with play — a series of approaches that sounds a lot like music to me.
That’s the key here. So is Rytmos easy? This is not quite right. Instead, Rytmos knows what it wants you to enjoy—the moment when the puzzle pieces come together (often in the form of the number 8), and the moment when a chain of triggered sounds reaches a certain critical mass and becomes musical. Puzzles don’t want to interrupt the music you’re collaborating on.
This is what elevates Rytmos from a great puzzle game to my all-around game. This is a game that is obsessed with music and wants to share that obsession with players. When I play, I feel like the game is actively encouraging me to be more curious about these things.
so. Each of Rytmos’ individual puzzles takes place on one side of a sort of shattered space cube that you’re slowly assembling. Complete a puzzle and more surfaces will slide into place with their own puzzle pieces. Complete six of them, and you’ve completed a cube, a coherent piece of music, and you pull back to find that the cube is a planet orbiting a star. Each star has three planets, which means three sets of puzzles, which means three pieces of music. Crucially, though, each star has a theme. Rytmos uses the galaxy to take us around the world musically.
So with one star, you’re playing mid-20th century Hawaiian music. There is a star where you can explore Indonesia’s traditional gamelan music. The set of levels with the teleporter is, of course, German electronic music from the seventies. Neu’s entire solar system! You don’t just learn about the traditions, when you put a level together, the puzzles allow you to dive into it and get a feel for the rhythm, the kinds of choices each tradition encourages. And, through those repeated figure-of-eights you’re tracing, you might gain insight into the more general musical ideas that connect all these traditions.
Your reward for completing each planet is a tool to play with. Awesome, I like the fact that you can record your own loops and store them in the record case. But the real payoff, at least for an ignorant and somewhat deaf person like me, is the sudden realization that all this stuff exists. Rytmos gave me something I was familiar with – surf Hawaiian guitars and all that Neu! – but it also gave me insight into Ethiopian jazz, and it gave me the names of the people I should start with if I wanted to research this music myself. What a delight. This stellar-spanning puzzler led to playlists, emails to old friends, sharing, borrowing. Wondering how different things are connected and how they came to be.
