Rhythm Doctor review

Rhythm Doctor is the master of the single input. A game that only needed my space bar to utterly challenge my musical timing and tug on my heartstring through six acts replete with stunning visual presentation and interwoven stories that see even the most minor characters have their moment in the spotlight.

You would think that a rhythm game relying on just one button would saddle developer 7th Beat Games with a painfully limited scope. I'd argue that's a little true in the earlier levels of Rhythm Doctor—where the game is doing its best to help you get to grips with different beats and timing. But even in the moments where the game is still busy establishing its foundational gameplay, it's done with such pizzazz and care for every character and setting involved.

Medical beatment

Middlesea Hospital has found itself with a pretty significant staff shortage, but also a brand-new experimental treatment courtesy of Ian, one of the institution's few remaining doctors putting in an insane amount of overtime.

Part of this Rhythm Doctor treatment (hey, that's the name of the game) involves me, a mute intern with the ability to administer care remotely with the help of a comically long noodle arm and a pointer finger undoubtedly suffering from a severe case of RSI by the time I rolled credits. By listening to and synchronising with a patient's heartbeat—through tapping the spacebar to the rhythm—it can help to fix up any irregularities and start the steps towards curing their ailments.

It's a rather out-there premise, sure, but it's one grounded in relatable, down-to-earth characters and their stories. Overworked doctors, burned-out creatives, newly loved-up teenagers, and an injured baseball star terrified to lose his identity are just some of the patients who find themselves at Middlesea Hospital.

Many of their stories begin separately, but Rhythm Doctor somehow manages to find ways to have all of these different individuals cross paths. Some of them feel a bit silly—like a miner who uses his bungee cord to assist baseball star Lucky Jonronero through physical therapy, the latter of whom then goes on to teach a samurai patient how to bat—but 7th Beat Games' determination to ensure nobody sits on the sidelines makes this ensemble cast incredibly endearing.

That even extends as far as the game's multitude of tutorials. Almost every single one features the same demo patient—an adorable farmer called Hugh who I felt genuinely bad for when he was promptly shooed off by a mouthy, impatient politician in one tutorial. Even the voice who counts in a number of Rhythm Doctor's mechanics is given a bit of lore: a Chinese nurse who goes on to learn English and also turns out to be a dab hand at piano.

It sounds like utter nonsense, but it adds so much colour to the tutorials, a thing I notoriously hate in videogames.

Note-worthy

The sheer number of them is a necessary evil in Rhythm Doctor though, as the game finds just about every single way to contort different rhythms and beats into different mechanics. Standard seventh beats, swing rhythms, freeze notes that require me to delay inputs, and multi-hit notes that I need to listen for the nurse's shotcall to figure out how many I have to hit.

They trickle in slowly at first, but Rhythm Doctor begins to layer them by giving me multiple patients to look after at once, or switching up the timing at a moment's notice. Everything is audially telegraphed in a way that never feels like it's interfering with the music, but is plenty clear enough to clue me in to how I need to respond to the incoming beat.

And what a joy the music is—from chill lo-fi beats, to drum and bass, to love songs, to rip-roaring guitar tracks—Rhythm Doctor knows how to put on a hell of a show and tell a story through its song choices. There's a little something for everybody here with both vocal and pure instrumental tracks to comb through, and I've spent the last several hours humming the hospital lobby's theme song as I've gone about my day. They are absolute earworms.

But for me, Rhythm Doctor well and truly shines in its stellar visual presentation. This is a game that oozes playfulness, experimentation, and the strikingly obvious fact that 7th Beat Games had an absolute blast designing every nook and cranny of this thing, and nowhere is that clearer than just looking at how the game uses the whole damn buffalo when it comes to its art style and visuals.

I seriously don't want to spoil too much here because it's genuinely fantastic to see all of the different ways 7th Beat Games manages to stop Rhythm Doctor from being nothing more than a pulsing EKG line in the middle of my screen. It implements a ton of visual gimmicks—screen glitches, contorting and zipping a small window of the game around my monitors, even going so far as to trick me by making me think my goddamn game had frozen.

I am a huge sicko for these kinds of visual gimmicks—I play Pump it Up, a dance game that has a whole identity revolving around the things in its higher-level charts so of course I love it—and Rhythm Doctor absolutely freakin' nails them. They never overstay their welcome or lose their novelty, either. They're peppered in just enough to make them a helluva load of fun to experience but surround them with plenty of more 'ordinary' levels that are still able to shine thanks to Rhythm Doctor's gorgeous pixel art.

I'm particularly a fan of one of the earlier levels that sees barista Nicole seemingly serve an entire city's worth of coffee drinkers inside one tiny hospital, and a later level where I get to watch my home runs tick up as Lucky swings away at a baseball. Tiny little details like this that have my eyes glued to my monitor every single time, even when it comes at the expense of desperately counting "1-2-3-4-5-6-SEVEN HIT THE SPACEBAR" to myself.

That's the thing that ultimately makes Rhythm Doctor so compelling: details. Nothing feels like fluff, a thing tacked on to pad the game out or fill the lulls between big story moments. Everything has a purpose, a reason for being there. Even if it doesn't seem that way at first, Rhythm Doctor will find a way to justify its existence.

Every single second is trying to do something: make me laugh, cry, lose my mind, or simply hit the spacebar. Every single second is worth paying attention to. Because if you don't, you'll lose even a tiny part of just how special this game is.