The beats of the song control the pace of your enemies, when they move, when they strike, when they leave themselves unguarded. The weapons you find and equip have their own attack ranges and damage quirks - a flail I found had a really wide area but also hopped me forward, a poisoned dagger inflicted damage over time - and then there's the fact that it's all sort of built around that roguelike staccato rhythm. It's hard to get your head around at first.
Battling is all to do with timing and placement: you need to learn the rhythm of an enemy and then insinuate yourself into that rhythm, ducking around strikes, avoiding shields and getting the smack on your foes when they're wide open. In fact, as you move there's often a dancefloor effect underneath you. Combat is automatic - you bump into enemies as if you're clumsy on the dancefloor. But each screen of Hyrule is its own little combat encounter: a chunk of carefully designed terrain filled with baddies and treasure chests and - perhaps! - hidden areas and opportunities.Īnd you move to a beat here, yomping from one spot to the next in time with the lavishly reworked Zelda tunes, given an electro buzz one second and a disco bounce the next. You explore Hyrule as Link - or Zelda or Cadence, zapped in from a distant world, each character having their own special abilities and available in co-op - and it's filled with recognisable landmarks like Lake Hylia and those muddlesome woods. Cadence of Hyrule takes the world of Zelda and the combat of NecroDancer and makes them work together. Even after a deluge, even after the apocalypse, everything is in its place.Īnd yet it works.
The series' defining moment, for me anyway, is that bit in Wind-Waker where Link travels beneath the surface of the Great Sea and finds Hyrule itself frozen in a bubble. In Zelda, nothing is ever left to chance, every outcome, every possible action has been foreseen. The pitch is gloriously weird: Crypt of the NecroDancer, a rhythm-action procedural dungeon-crawl is to be stirred together with Zelda, perhaps the least procedural game series of all time. So much about Cadence of Hyrule feels like this: a meeting of distant worlds that results in something that just snaps together as if it was meant to be, that results in something harmonious. Here is a word of our own that fits perfectly. Zelda is filled with wonderful words of its own devising. It says there is a hidden order in nature and this order is beautiful - elegant and taut and melancholic and not to be messed with. Cadence! This word is a song and a river and a waterfall. Two designs collide gloriously in a Zelda variation that rivals the greatness of the core games themselves.Ĭonsider it for a second: cadence.
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