7 Amazing Gems To Get For Cheap During Steam’s Big Rhythm Game Sale

Before making this year’s mind-bending mystery game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, developer Simogo made a big splash in 2019 with its vaporwave rhythm adventure Sayonara Wild Hearts. Billed as a pop album video game, Sayonara Wild Hearts feels unlike anything else, and is more akin to a dream or a particularly trippy listening session.

Each level is set to a different song, which make up the game/album’s track list. Most of these levels take the form of an endless runner in which you move to avoid obstacles and collect hearts. There are boss fights peppered in as well, and everything incorporates rhythm inputs to the beat. It’s all a fast-paced fever dream that you only really begin to appreciate when you fully immerse yourself in the visual and sonic overload going on. To make the package sweeter, the game can be completed in about an hour, just about the runtime of a solid album with a hefty helping of bangers.

The coming-of-age story about anthropomorphic dinosaurs in high school waiting for the world to end might sound pretty out there, but the emotional beats of Goodbye Volcano High are deeply grounded in reality. One part visual novel and one part rhythm game, this title uses its musical themes to dive into the seemingly endless angst of its cast. They are all young kids lost in some way or another. For protagonist Fang, their band’s music becomes the central output for those messy feelings.

Goodbye Volcano High pulls off something a lot of games about bands can’t: the music actually rocks. So when you get to take control and play through some challenging but rewarding rhythm sections in some sick tunes it only makes you feel better, even if the songs themselves are about some pretty heavy topics. The music is used to punctuate a larger story that pretty much everyone will connect with, one that is written with incredible care and earnestness.

Listen, you’ve probably heard about how good Hi-Fi Rush is so much by now that you are sick of it, but guess what? Hi-Fi Rush is really that good. The action-rhythm game from Tango Gameworks surprised everyone when it shadow-dropped in 2023 and turned out to be such a delight.

While that was partially due to its gorgeous, vibrant world and humorous tone brought to life by a wonderful cast of characters, the main attraction was the action. Hi-Fi Rush is a hack-n-slash action game where launching attacks on the beat of the soundtrack gives you greater power. To help you stay on the rhythm, the whole world pulses to the tune of whatever song is playing. Getting into the groove and launching combos to the beat becomes a satisfying gameplay loop for action newbies and veterans alike.

This pick is all about silliness. You might have seen clips of Trombone Champ cracking people up across the internet when it was released in 2022. That’s because the simple premise of a rhythm game in which you play trombone is really just a vessel for hilarious footage of people playing lots of famous songs very very badly.

The mii-like player avatars, constant hot-dog jokes, and the sight of the word NASTY flooding the screen when you fail to play a note properly feels like chaos, but it’s actually a carefully orchestrated recipe for endless good times and laughter. The real secret of Trombone Champ, though, is that the game is still actually fun. What might at first seem like a shallow premise designed just to spark some laughs is still the foundation for a well-designed rhythm game that can be mastered with skill and patience. It doesn’t hurt that you’ll have a lot of laughs on the way to success, though.

Melatonin’s pastel color palette and laid-back vibes feel like they belong beside the lofi girl on YouTube. This rhythm game is all about relaxation. Its various levels offer dreamlike challenges to complete to the beat, free of distraction from any overwhelming interface.

As feels apt for a game about music, the cues you need to follow come almost entirely from the game’s soundtrack and animations. By paying attention to the game’s subtle cues, you’re able to deduce the proper button inputs. This gameplay works best in Melatonin’s remix levels which rearrange and merge past stages together in a beautiful cacophony of sounds and mechanics that isn’t just more interesting to listen to but more satisfying to play.

2015’s stellar Crypt of the NecroDancer takes the roguelike genre and adds a rhythm-based twist. Mostly this game plays as you might expect a roguelike to: you wander around dungeons full of enemies to fight and treasure to uncover while trying not to die, and you start your loop from the beginning each time. Here, however, your movement is done to the beat of the soundtrack. Through moving to the beat, you build up a scoring multiplier.

To make matters more interesting, enemies also move to the beat. They do this in predetermined patterns so watching and learning how every enemy moves becomes a key part of Crypt of the NecroDancer. Navigating the dungeons while fighting enemies who are moving erratically all around you and trying to keep your inputs in time with the beat becomes a fast-paced thrill ride. If you like roguelikes, you’ll be happy to know this is a very well-done take on the genre thanks to its strategic sonic twist.

What if Doom were also a rhythm game? Well, BPM: Bullets Per Minute is probably what you would get. The musical first-person shooter sends you into hell to fight off hordes of enemies with your big guns while blasting some sick rock tunes.

Shooting has to be done on the beat in BPM, and successfully matching the rhythm boosts your score multiplier. As an incentive to stay focused, if you miss the beat your gun will misfire. This turns the game into a frantic twitch shooter that requires good aim, precise movement, and awareness of whatever song is currently being played. The game is also a roguelike, so you’ll be running through procedurally generated levels to take down enemies. If that sounds a bit like the previous entry on this list, that’s because Crypt of the NecroDancer was one of BPM’s inspirations! Like that title, BPM excels at combining its two seemingly disparate elements to form one endlessly satisfying adventure.

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