TaroNuke and k//eternal publish a rhythm game together. Oh boy this is going to be a ride. Bring a cheap mechanical keyboard you don’t mind breaking with you.
Have you ever watched high level A Dance of Fire and Ice? A lot of the people who play/record/stream that have an input display that not only shows what’s being pressed/held, but show a little history of keystrokes by emitting little blocks from the keys that scroll upwards.
k//eternal dead-ass saw this and thought “that would make a cool rhythm game.”
So they got in touch with Taro, and together they made PROJEKT GODHAND.
GODHAND is a 2 input rhythm game, where each input is mapped to every button on the corresponding half of the keyboard. When notes fall down on any of the game’s 4 left or right columns, you have to press the same number of keys on that side of the keyboard. You don’t have to press the a corresponding to the column, just to the side. A bunch of notes all coming down in a single column, in any other rhythm game would be terrifying to witness (We call these Jackhammers, and I personally hate them), but in GODHAND, you can just play them as trills or stairs or any other pattern that you find comfortable to play.
The most you’ll be expected to play is 8 keys at once, 4 on each side, but there is an assist option when you launch the game to nerf the inputs. The game’s main mode is Hellbent mode, which is essentially assist-off mode, but if you don’t have n-key roll over on your keyboard and it swallows up chords super easily, you can switch to Glorious mode, where the game only expects you to use 3 buttons on each side, and automatically turns 3 button chords into 4 button chords whenever it would benefit you. Do note that Glorious mode has a seperate high score table to Hellbent mode, similar to how wings/autodrift are handled in EX-XDRiVER.
In it’s current state the game has about a dozen songs, but that’s because it literally just released into early access. The plan is apparently to have 25 songs in free play and additional content added by the first chapter of the story. Knowing Taro, the songs are going to continue ramping up in bullshit visual effects and gimmicks, and knowing k//eternal, the story is going to be incredibly homosexual.
This game is already one of the silliest most over the top things I’ve ever seen in the rhythm game space (not counting NotITG, that one is in an entirely different league.) The score is on a scale normalized to 200 quadrillion; The difficulty of each chart is dynamically calculated on a scale of 0-15000 based on how players perform on the chart; The player rating is literally just a text input field instead of something the game trys to figure out. One of the key methods to play for score is to overmash because extra inputs fill your heat, and heat becomes your multiplier. Sure it makes the timing windows tighter, but it’s also required for getting high scores.
Also the music is a bop, they really know how to pick ’em.
“did you know that mechanical keyboards are probably cheaper than you think? you can find decently usable 60% keyboards for like 30 USD. not the best but you’re going to demolish it anyway. you’ll probably want one as a godhand controller”
– Steam store page
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2978440 £8.53 (Demo available)
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