Cytus review: the beautiful rhythm game of emotion

Cytus is by far one of the most beautiful and challenging games I’ve come across, and surprise, surprise; it’s not an RPG, but a rhythm game by Taiwanese game development studio, Rayark Inc.

Aside from its amazing art, Cytus also has a side story set in a distant future run by robots. As the only sentient beings left on the planet, the robots converted human emotions and memories into music to prevent them from fading away, and stored all of these songs in a place called Cytus. The robots use these songs as a way to experience human emotion. The story may be rather insignificant for a rhythm game, but the whole concept contributes to the game being more interesting.

Cytus is divided into different chapters with ten songs each. For every 100,000 paid downloads, Rayark updates the game with a new chapter and ten songs within in three months following the 100,000 paid downloads. According to the official website, Cytus has ten chapters in total. The game currently has seven chapters, each with a creative and mysterious name, and 497,230 paid downloads to date.

Gameplay: it’s about fast and timed fingers

Cytus has really simple gameplay. The idea is to tap on the circles in time with the music playing. You can also produce a combo by successfully tapping circles in time. The game’s mechanics do get a bit more complicated as you unlock more songs and play them on a higher difficulty. Check out the gameplay video:

The songs in Cytus have two difficulties: easy and hard. I typically find most handheld rhythm games too easy, I’m glad to report that in Cytus, the hard mode is difficult. You can’t start the game, select hard mode and expect to come out with flying colors. You need to be more familiar with how the game works. This may be because I’m not that familiar with touch rhythm games, but I like it anyway.

One thing I liked about Cytus is that it required me to use two hands. _ Hatsune Miku: Project Diva 2nd, for instance, can be played with one hand if your timing is good. You could do that with _Cytus if you have a big enough hand, or fast enough fingers, but it requires more effort. I found my fingers getting entangled with each other, and my hands blocking my view, but you’ll find a way to deal with this, just as I did.

(See: 10 things that break your stride in rhythm games)