While the movie, music, and sports industries were hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in devastating ways, the gaming industry was affected in a peculiar way. As people stayed indoors, gaming became a more popular pastime, causing the demand for games to rise higher than ever. However, big game developers could not meet those demands as pandemic restrictions limited coordination among teams with numerous people involved. This leads to the current situation, where indie games developed by small groups flourish in an industry once monopolized by giants. Games like Among Us, Fall Guys, Untitled Goose Game, Hades rose to the top last year, and in late February, another new game was released, proving that indie games will continue to stay strong this year.

Many gaming fans will remember 2019 when 7th Beat Games, a team with 11 people, shocked the community with their first game, the Dance of Fire and Ice, a simple yet ingenious rhythm game. This year, they are back again with a new and improved one-button rhythm game, Rhythm Doctor.

In Rhythm Doctor, you play as an unnamed intern for Middlesea Hospital, trying out a new medical practice where you fix irregularities in a patient's heart through music. By pressing the spacebar at the seventh (or sometimes second) beat in each song, you defibrillate the patient’s crazy heartbeat. However, as more patients arrive while a virus infiltrates the hospital system, shenanigans ensue and it’s up to you to help the understaffed hospital. 

The simple one-button-click gameplay is heavily inspired by the Nintendo classic Rhythm Heaven series, but 7th Beat Games improves on it using the advantages PC has over consoles to implement a much more creative interaction. It is hard to make an engaging rhythm game; good music is a must and, more importantly, good controls. Developers need to create simple controls that would hook the players quickly, and, if played correctly, always challenge players so they will come back for more. Many successful rhythm games utilize multiple buttons to press on the beat to fulfill the controls requirement, but using only one button makes the whole task harder. 

On Nintendo DS and Wii, Rhythm Heaven managed to make the gameplay challenging for players through distractions like suddenly changing beats or quickly changing from one scene to another. Rhythm Doctor, while using the same tactics, takes another step to keep the players entertained. By using the story setting of a virus infiltrating the hospital network, the player will encounter glitches during gameplay that distract them from keeping the beat. For instance, my favorite stage of the game, the boss stage of act 2, forces players to play in windowed mode. While players try to press the button on the beat, the windowed game also moves around the screen to the beat, making a chaotic yet fun experience. These creative twists to the simple one-button smashing gameplay steadily increases the difficulty of the game as the player proceeds, making sure they are never bored. 

While many reviews for Rhythm Doctor have or mention its distraction mechanic, I want to mention one thing it has achieved that many rhythm games fail to do. At the end of the day, rhythm games are heavily arcade-ish — their main feature is their difficulty and replay value. It is difficult to incorporate story into arcade games, making rhythm games a genre with almost no story aspects. This is where I believe 7th beat Games brought their A game. Through cutscenes between and during levels, Rhythm Doctor manages to create the basis for a story. The lyrics of the music and background animations for each level fleshes out each patient along with the doctors in Middlesea hospital. Although the story is nowhere near as complex as an adventure game, the fact that Rhythm Doctor attempted to put emotion into a rhythm game — and succeeded — shows a huge win not only for the rhythm game genre but for arcade games in general.

So, should you buy this game? Yes. It is still in early access, so as of now, Rhythm Doctor is not the full game. It is also possible to wait until the game is officially released, but it’s a cheap indie game. We might as well enjoy it now and enjoy it even more when version 1.0 releases. This game is a great start for indie games this year. While games with huge budgets, with their beautiful graphics and gameplay mechanics, give players an experience like no other, they have more recently served as a sign that the gaming industry is rotting and becoming repetitive with re-releases and reboots of the same games and decades-old series. Thanks to this rise in indie games, players like me can enjoy a breath of fresh air in the gaming community with new, interesting, and creative games — Rhythm Doctor definitely being one of them.