It’s really important to know exactly what you’re capturing when you say something is “inspired by” or “similar to.” For example, you can easily argue that Avatar is similar to Ferngully due to themes of nature and humans injecting themselves in to save a world that really doesn’t need them. Or that my bottle of Elmer’s Glue is similar to the Big Arch because they have nearly the same ingredients. So when you pick up GRIDbeat! and see the titles connected to it, you might get excited in a way that plays to an element that isn’t necessarily going to appear. Specifically, if you got ready for Crypt of the Necrodancer as a cyberpunk thrill ride, you’re going to get most of those factors at work for your enjoyment: you just might not receive exactly what you’re expecting.

If it was like this every time I logged into my PC, I might never leave the house.

For GRIDbeat!, you play a hacker-for-hire that has a small amount of customization, but is otherwise a pretty blank slate of a pre-fabbed protagonist. Being selected by an unknown benefactor, your job is to break into a seemingly impenetrable system, extract some data that you don’t need to know about, and get your ass out so you can get paid. As expected, there’s immediately so many twists: Knoss.OS turns out to be massively aggressive, the entity who hired you seems to know you intimately, and you even end up on an airgapped computer at one point, somehow, because dramatics. But, honestly, in spite of the entire gameplay being driven by the story itself, you can let concerns about logistics and meaning just fall away, because you’re playing an Acclaim title. The grandaddy of publishing “screw reason, here’s a dope experience” games is back, and they’re cosigning GRIDbeat!

You’ve got yourself a rhythm based exploration/puzzle game where the player needs to only move on the beat of an ever expanding soundtrack. Every level is a very controlled, manufactured experience of a dungeon where the player can only move in so many ways. As you get through the level, different elements come into play. A majority of the game can be viewed from three perspectives: survival, completion and perfection. Initially, players will simply want to get through the level so they can better understand the layout for future runs. Then, you’ll want to pick up every MacGuffin available to check off those accomplishments for the aforementioned level. Finally, you’ll want to achieve the Sweet Beat title of finishing the stage in a set number of moves, which is exceedingly challenging. The overall idea leaves you with plenty of replay if you end up hooked on the central mechanics.

Seriously, this writing is for me, and I love it.

There’s no double that GRIDbeat! comes to play in terms of visuals and music. The neon drenched layout that contrasts multiple levels of piercing colors with deep darkness allows the game to pulsate with personality and content. Even though a lot of the sprites and aspects of the game seem relatively simplistic in comparison to other ideas, the execution gives the ideal setting for a cyberpunk rhythm game. The wireframe outline of the turrets, the Mino.TOR’s  manic glow, even the retro threat of the Daemon boss gives you so much to appreciate and admire as you struggle to survive. The decision to also have your avatar float in reflection on the screen, like you’re staring into an arcade cabinet, is a masterful stroke of immersion. Ridiculous Games has made their mark in presentation, and it’s a memorable one indeed.

The music is everything I could want in a rhythm game. Throughout GRIDbeat!, you continually encounter different flavors of hacker-adjacent tunes and tones that keep you in the mood and in the pocket of the beat. You’ve got trance, neonwave, house, electronic funk, synthwave and more. From relentless bass to eerie vocals that put you in the cybernetic mindset, locking you down to keep your fingers dancing over the keys and the joypad to dive deeper and deeper into the system. It’s borderline absurd that the soundtrack is not immediately available for purchase on the Steam page, but my imagination is that we’ll see it come later, potentially with more tracks and levels as time progresses. Be sure to check out the additional levels with featured songs and tracks: Steve Aoki’s Double Helix is a showstopping track that fits so well.

As a personal preference, I would recommend tamping down or even turning off the SFX in the settings simply because the extra sounds would occasionally throw me off from the rhythm. When you pick up a data pack, or have a digital missile explode near you, you get tones or boops that simply aren’t a part of the song and make everything feel wonky and out of place. When you look at a classic like Rhythm Heaven, every single sound matches the stage you’re playing, and so your movements become a part of the overall orchestra. By contrast, each time I grabbed something from the screen, the atonal “ding” felt like I was trying to chime in on a song I had no business singing. Removing the sound effects let me focus more on the game and the incredible soundtrack.

My death is glorious, even if it means I need to do this fight again.

Gameplay itself for GRIDbeat! is such a tumultuous beast that it deserves some deeper digging. Besides simply moving to the rhythm, there’s a matter of hacking that comes into play. You end up with a variety of different ICE (the software) to deal with, from some that’s simply engagement to others that require additional button presses (on beat, of course) or lining up a couple of concentric rings worth of information to unlock your progress. It’s incredibly important to figure out the best way to beat ICE at every opportunity, even if it means being a little unorthodox. You cannot let ICE win (you are a hacker, after all). Sometimes you’ll need to go and download additional upgrades to successfully defeat ICE. The player never lets ICE get the upper hand, because you’re resourceful and ICE is dirt simple. Still, it’s always a pain to deal with ICE.

There are a huge variety of exciting moments that happen within the game to keep it crisp and dynamic. The Mino.TOR will chase you through the levels, forcing you to drop traps and figure out creative ways to dodge through the stage. There will be different types of drone turrets that you can trick into targeting each other, letting the self-defense systems blow each other up in the process. And when a system format is finally triggered, you get a hair-raising giddiness of trying to flee a literal firewall that’s coming to destroy you. Something about running for your life while also trying to stay on beat is incredibly fun, and is honestly such a joy every time I encounter it.  Given that you will need to rerun the stages several times to achieve everything, it’s great to find your favorite aspects and lean into them.

The digital represtenation of a format is pitch perfect.

GRIDbeat! is out for Steam and Nintendo Switch, but you’re a fool if you don’t use a controller. While the movement through the system can be done with a keyboard as well as a joystick, the hacking controls are relegated to either the shoulder buttons or a choice of shift or spacebar. The problem is that the ICE hacking usually involves holding down one button, pushing with one joystick, and then subsequently hitting additional ABYX buttons to complete the hack. If you do this on the keyboard, it means holding down the spacebar, pushing with an arrow key, and then picking a WASD at the very right second. It made my hand cramp every time, and I almost wept with relief once I finally swapped to the correct way to play the game. There’s no keyboard remapping, so good luck with however you decide.

Not all the gameplay elements of GRIDbeat! work as well as the developers would like. For example, the levels start to get quite long towards the second half of the game, and the checkpoint system isn’t really fantastic. For example, you will, occasionally, get a chance to do a “backup” mid level, which means you won’t need to continue from the very beginning. But for one stage (with a great track by Shadow Kitten), you can get obliterated by the Mino.TOR if you’re not ready for when it spawns. The insult to the injury came when the game offered to load my backup, which rebirthed me directly in the path of the Mino.TOR about three beats before it trampled me to death again. It felt almost insulting, like the game wanted to punish me twice for being unprepared at a sudden appearance I couldn’t have known about otherwise.

So…many…power…buttons…

Also, the customized Deck system feels very flat and ho-hum. Being able to swap in certain components for your hacking experience (setting traps, creating pulses, adding a shield level for safety) are cool, but they tend to distract from the main gameplay experience of moving and dancing through the levels. Don’t get me wrong, there are stages where these interchangeable components are both necessary and important, and you cannot advance without them. But you don’t even think about them a lot of the time because they simply can just be turned on and off as you need them. The more data packets you collect, the more you can have on simultaneously, and it only takes a handful of perfect stages to become overpowered in a way that doesn’t actually feel powerful.

Finally, in the complaint department, I was honestly expecting a roguelike element to be present because that’s one of the bigger ideas behind Crypt of the Necrodancer. I absolutely do not mind that everything is set up more of a puzzle rhythm game, and it was still an excellent adventure, but my mindset was totally backwards from the drop because of what was promised. If Acclaim had professed this to be a rhythm version of Hacknet, I would have been disappointed because the “hacking” would be totally different. With the comparison to Necrodancer, you move about on a grid to music and…that’s really the only comparison. Again, it’s not a terrible situation, but it’s different than what you’d think.

But the overall effect is still superb, and rhythm games live and die by the feeling. You can get a thousand different titles that let you smash arrows, hit colored lights, draw lines or press piano keys with pinpoint precision, and their fans will defend them with utter depravity. GRIDbeat! positively cooks with music that’s not only perfect for the environment, but designs and formulas that feel right. No, you’re not actually hacking a Gibson, but you can easily project that idea onto the dashes and blinks that make up the world inside Knoss.OS. The controls become intuitive and your fingers and thumbs dance in time. Once you start playing, it’s impossible to stop. GRIDbeat! creates a world you joyously fling yourself into. You let the game devour you as voraciously as you devour it, and, together, you form an ouroboros of music and light. 

With all that said and done, the pros far outweigh the cons. GRIDbeat! is truly something marvelous in the music and the engagement. You get sucked in immediately, nodding your head and becoming enthralled in the movement, the mystique and the melody. There’s a vibrant life to it all, and the mix of poppy beats with a deep cyber funk keeps me reloading stages again and again. The challenges and the featured levels are just as fun, if not moreso, than the main storyline, and players looking for a completion challenge will certainly find it. Get a controller, put on your wired headphones, and jack in, cowboy: spring’s coming, and we gotta melt some ICE.

GRIDbeat! is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on PC.

A Copy of GRIDbeat! was provided by the publisher.