Anyone who makes or writes music knows that the path to a finished track is not linear. It’s a process of weaving instruments in and out of the composition at the whim of the person making them. And even when the vision is clear and you know exactly where you want to take the song, whether it’s behind a drum kit, keyboard, loop track, or even a computer, things can get in the way. Rytmos, developer Floppy Club’s first non-mobile game, captures that sentiment. It uses riddles to extract the joy, escalation, triumphs and trials of making music, and with great success.
The game begins with a nondescript universe being thrown into disarray and challenges you to repair each planetary system made up of 18 puzzles. Each of the seven astral bodies will be directed back into orbit upon completion of the puzzles. It’s a simple setup, and colorful, spacey, lo-fi visuals add a certain warmth to Rytmos’ art style that carries over into the rest of the experience. Floppy Club builds each puzzle on the same foundation – use the mouse or analog stick (on Switch) to move a red and orange disk through standing columns on a track. Each pillar represents a different aspect of the song that you build through these puzzles, and to complete a puzzle you must move the disc through each pillar and back to the starting point, creating a loop.
This loop is the first of six loops you create to create the song. The puzzles start out easy but get progressively more challenging at an intriguing pace. Floppy Club throws in various obstacles to tease the brain, like ice cubes that keep moving until they hit a wall, warp portals, origami-like bricks that move with your disc, and more. What I like most about these puzzles is that, similar to the rest of the game, it’s more about the feeling of building something than they represent obstacles on the way to an end goal. There are challenges to complete, and one particular puzzle kept me stuck for about 15 minutes, but the puzzle-shy needn’t fear what’s in store for Rytmos’ few hours of play.
I loved hearing each track come to life as I solved puzzles, and learning about each system’s specific genre of music taught me new things like how an instrument is played, a genre’s place in a specific culture and much more. A system’s music is inspired by traditional Zimbabwean Mbira music. There’s another that uses Japanese environmental music from the early 1980s that the game taught me was used back then to fill up environmental spaces like grocery stores. I particularly liked the system inspired by 1960s and 70s Ethiopian jazz, and in addition to these genres not often highlighted in games, each set of puzzles rewards you with the primary instrument used to create the track.
Using the game’s built-in loop record system, you can then play that instrument to create your own beats. As someone familiar with real loop systems and creating beats, Rytmos’ recording process isn’t as in-depth as I would have liked, but it’s a nice introduction to how a loop track works.
If you don’t feel like creating your own beats, you can still enjoy playing around with the instruments. And there’s an excellent range of instruments too. The usual, like guitars, are present, but Floppy Club shows great respect for the musical arts, incorporating instruments from different cultures around the world.
Rytmos is short and sweet, and its minimalist visuals and zen-like beats warmed me up. Its puzzles fit with everything else the game does, and it all works well together to highlight the music, the place of its inspirations in the story, and the instruments they create. Floppy Club’s audiophile pedigree shines through in Rytmos, and it feels like it was specifically designed for musicians and music enthusiasts, but puzzle fans will also find a relaxing afternoon of challenges to play through here.
