I love this game so much! The music is a real treat! (which is good for a musical game) So many new arrangements of classic tracks that compile into a greatest hits medley that is a feast for the ears. Zelda is my favorite gaming franchise and it gets a lot of love of course, but since Breath of the Wild I have felt like “old zelda” isn’t the focus. It’s nice to have a Zelda game with the Triforce and Ganon. It’s nice to have Zelda as a playable character. This game is filled with little treats. The things fans have been begging for in the mainline titles. It’s all here.

The puzzles are here but simpler than your traditional Zelda game. The dungeons and caves incorporate more dungeon crawler elements. A fresh concept for Zelda that makes the game as a whole feel unique with the caveat of giving each dungeon less individuality and memorability.

Classic Zelda is here with all its charm. The game blends the styles of Zelda and Crypt beautifully creating a unique experience. The return of Zelda items and a magic meter alongside the elements of Crypt such as the shovel and torch durability work perfectly together. I especially love losing all your personal belongings and rupees upon death only to be brought to a room beyond death in a place to spend your hard earned diamonds. This game simply forces a smile on your face.

I’ve been hoping for a new 2D Zelda for a while and it’s been right here all this time. This is Zelda; a different iteration but Zelda nonetheless.

Cadence of Hyrule is an innovative frantically-paced puzzle game. The Zelda elements, and the visuals in general, are tonally consistent with the franchise. The music in particular is absolutely stellar, both in composition and implementation.

Unfortunately the structure of the game is a bit obtuse, which is made worse by inconsistent tutorializing. It's not clear initially which items are permanent upgrades and which disappear on death, or which levels are set and which will procedurally regenerate. The difficulty curve is more like a series of ledges. First, the default timing-based combat will feel chaotic and unpredictable. Then, for a blissful hour or so, the game lands exactly at it should: challenging but fair, frantic and rewarding. Then, as the player's skill increases and certain weapons are unlocked, it becomes a somewhat tedious exercise as the challenge evaporates without increasing the pace of the material.

Despite these issues I really enjoyed my time with this game. It is truly a breath of fresh air to play something that takes risks and has a consistent vision, even if the result has a bit of jank to it.

An interesting experiment, not just in Nintendo licensing their big boy IPs to indie teams, but also in turning the simple short runs of Necrodancer into what is a 4-6 hour adventure. And the initial playthrough is fantastic, if a little easy.

The pixel art and DannyB soundtrack do the heavy lifting, and kept me from tiring out on the simple combat. If there's one huge improvement over Necrodancer, it's the graphics. A ton of care was put into this version of Hyrule, and you see it in every sprite. The developers probably knew fucking this up would mean Nintendo never does this again for anyone.

I wasn't expecting it to be as similar to the original Necrodancer than it was, though. There's no puzzles in the game that I recall, and shielding attacks is more or less here out of it being necessary in a Zelda game. But dungeons are basically 6 Necrodancer levels and a boss. The key difference being that this game is VERY forgiving. The roguelike elements have no real reason to exist because all dying does it make you lose your rupees, shovel and torch. And my lord, do you get showered in all them within a minute of respawning.

I think story mode is there for Zelda fans who might be terrible at rhythm games or roguelikes, but it leads to my key "problem that's not a problem" with the game. It's too long for a roguelike run. After beating it once at 4:30 hours, I'm sure I could do it in 2 next time, but that's too long for my taste, so I probably won't replay this game and stick to the original Necrodancer.

The only other comment I had while playing was; why not make the rhythm the challenge? It being 4/4 quarter notes the whole game means that you could just turn the sound off and still win. Why not add more complex time signatures?

But those are only little things. Cadence of Hyrule is still a fun passion project that combines the two IPs in the best way they could without alienating anyone. (It's also the closest thing Nintendo will do to making a new classic Zelda game on Switch.)

Overall, a pretty enjoyable love letter to the Zelda franchise, but I have to admit that most of its fun originated rather from the TLoZ coating than the actual gameplay style.
The music and the strong focus on exploration were definitely enough to hold me in a state of flow most times, but the rhythm based gameplay mechanics are not deep enough to fully keep me engaged. It's really curious: if the game offers you the possibility to actually turn off its main feature, maybe the rest of the game wasn't designed around it enough in the first place.

I was scrolling through my YouTube feed a couple years ago and I saw an essay on this game. I did not click on the video and thought to myself, “huh, what a nice mod/fan game this is.” Not realizing until a few years later that this is an official licensed Nintendo game. I love this game and I think it’s genius. But the real take away from this is, I wish this happened more. I wish more big wig companies like Microsoft and Sony would license there IPs to indie developers for creative projects. And maybe the game didn’t sell well enough so Nintendo dropped this idea, but I want to see idie developers with the Pokemon IP to see what wild things they come up with like this game. Nintendo, stop teaming up with Ubisoft, give Super Giant the Mario IP and see where it takes you.