Much like skateboarding games, rhythm games have taken a lengthy break from the public eye. After the plastic instrument wave crashed, developers like Harmonix seemed uncertain about how to proceed. There have been breakout rhythm hits but the genre has never come anywhere near recapturing its glory days.

Instead, music games diversified. Sure, there's Beat Saber, which feels like the most natural evolution of the games from the Guitar Hero era, playable on an expensive piece of plastic you can use for many things instead of an inexpensive piece of plastic you can use for one thing. But there was also Tetris Effect, which combined music with puzzles, Cadence of Hyrule, which combined music with Zelda, and BPM: Bullets Per Minute and Metal: Hellsinger which combined music with shooting. And Harmonix, the one-time reigning king of the genre, recently made a music game you can only play inside Fortnite — one world-conquering hit devouring another.

Fretless Is Playing With A Full Deck Of Chords

Into this diverse space, enter Fretless. It isn't a traditional rhythm game, instead taking concepts from music and applying them to a turn-based RPG. I played 30 minutes of the game on the PAX East showfloor, and came away impressed by how thoughtfully developer Ritual Studios — a small, four-person team based in Illinois — is interweaving rock and roleplay.

"It was [always] a music RPG, [but] it actually wasn't really like this with the musical combat," says Jeff Linville, who handles sound and music for the game. "It was way more boring. Then, we started pitching it and people were like, 'You should really do the music.' And, we were like, 'Yeah, you're right.' So we ended up really wanting to make it like you're playing music, but we didn't want it to be a huge rhythm game. There's rhythmic elements as you saw, but it's not really like you have to be blasting the whole time."

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That’s true. Traditional rhythm mechanics only came into play in an optional minigame and in the boss battle that closed out the demo, as I had to nail button presses both to pull off a special move, and to block the boss’. But, the bulk of the musical implementation is less obvious and more interesting.

Riffing On A Level That Is Fricking Sublime

It may seem odd at first glance, but Fretless uses deckbuilder mechanics to accomplish that musical feeling. In the demo, I could play three cards at a time and, together, they formed a riff. In the same way that an A# may have an entirely different effect on the listener if played at the beginning or the end of a run of notes, Fretless asks you to think carefully about when you play cards.

For example, I had several cards that built up my shields. I also had a card that inflicted damage equal to my current shield level. So, I needed to make sure that card was arranged at the end of a riff so that it benefited from the boost the earlier cards provided my shields. It’s an interesting wrinkle that elevates Fretless’ combat to a higher level, and the longer I played, the more excited I got about the depth this battle system offered and the strategy it will demand to master it.

If the rest of the game can deliver on the thrill of combat I experienced in the demo, I’ll happily call for an encore.

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