7th Beat Games has announced that it will be releasing Rhythm Doctor on Nintendo Switch later this year.
Inspired by games such as Rhythm Heaven (known as Rhythm Paradise in Europe), 7th Beat Games has created a ‘one-button’ rhythm game that aims to teach the player complex music theory. The title starts with a simple “press the button on the 7th beat” premise that gets more challenging over time. Viruses plague your efforts even further, making the screen glitch and requiring you to keep the beat going in your head.
Rhythm Doctor is trying to take a different approach to the musical rhythm genre, teaching complex and irregular time signatures and polyrhythms rather than your standard ‘on-the-beat’ tracks. The Switch version of the game will allow two players to play together in a ‘drop-in’ local multiplayer mode, allowing each user to play with a single Joy-Con.
This aim of being different from other rhythm games was emphasised heavily in the game’s press release, which went on to say the following:
A lot of rhythm games just group songs together vaguely by difficulty and then throw bigger swarms of notes at you to hit. Rhythm Doctor, instead, features a story mode with hand-crafted levels with a fine-tuned difficulty curve, and a much lower “notes per second” than your average rhythm game. It’s about knowing when to hit them, not about being dextrous enough to tap them all.
