Nocturne Screenshot
Image: Pracy Studios

Hands up if you remember San Junipero, the Black Mirror episode where mankind has built its own afterlife - an idyllic 24/7 virtual party resort town - which people upload their minds to when their bodies finally run out of steam? Well, you're most of the way to the concept of Nocturne, a rhythm RPG that launched earlier this week. The other half is that something went terribly wrong, you're somehow the first person to be uploaded in a thousand years, and the place is now overrun by monsters that can only be defeated through the power of song.

I got sent an early key for the game and have only had time to just scrape the surface, but this looks and feels like a true-blue JRPG, full of levelling, equipment systems, stores, and upgrades. It's just that once you bump into an enemy, it becomes a four-button rhythm game, with two extra buttons - one for special attacks and one for using consumable items to keep yourself in the fight. Nothing too complicated, but honestly, any more and my brain's overheating.

And there's a whole lot of rhythm battling. I recently took a look at In Falsus, and while I enjoyed it a lot, it was about 70% visual novel, 20% puzzle game, 10% rhythm game. This here is a more condensed experience. Story-driven, but the developers estimate it's a little over ten hours for most. Every enemy type has its own song, but each area is full of roaming, repeated monster encounters à la Chrono Trigger, and while you can run past many of them, fighting them head-on gets you more resources and loot.

And while you'll be repeating some of those songs against some common enemies, there's no shortage of music here. 101 tracks to master, Pracy Studios, with boss tracks produced by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra, as seen in the trailer below. And while you'll be hearing them all during the story, there's an arcade mode where you can play them at your leisure, without worrying about the RPG elements.

If you're not a rhythm sicko, I wouldn't worry either. The game has six difficulty settings that change the difficulty of the note charts, so you can probably dial it into something that works for you. I'm no rhythm expert, so I've settled on the third setting, Adept. Maybe I'll go up one notch if I improve, but I doubt I'll ever be the kind of person to combo my way through anything demanding high-BPM, 500+ note combos. Still, from the chunk I've played, I've no complaints with Nocturne so far, and will definitely be digging deeper once I find the time.

Nocturne is out now for £17.75/$20, with a 10% launch discount running until October 6th. It's also bundled with other musical adventure Everhood 2, which I quite enjoyed too. On a related note, if you like Nocturne's rhythm combat, keep an eye out for Chordioid, which has a similar combat engine with even more RPG elements, and has a juicy demo to try out now.