Cytus Alpha

2025-06-22
Cytus Alpha is the middling bowl of trail mix of the rhythm game genre. It's website touts "one of the largest libraries in rhythm games...a staggering collection of over 200 songs" and if you just want to play a LOT of songs its got you covered. But if what you want is to play some GOOD songs you gotta dig.

As an experiment, after finishing the main set of ~150 songs in the games main 10 chapters I went through the ~70 songs left in the side chapters and only played a song if it Sparked Joy from the preview. That ended up being 11 songs. Of those 11 songs, 3 were No Joy, 5 were Some Joy, and 3 were Big Time Joy. That is to say 3 songs of 70+ were actually worth playing. If you had a batting average of .042 I think you would be clubbed to death in the dugout by your own team. And listen, music is subjective I get that. And hell I grew up reading Pitchfork, used to DJ, and am friends with a bunch of musicians so, yeah, I'm sure I'm more critical than the average player. But christ how many eurodance/dnb/breakbeat songs with a cheap VST singing over them can anyone stand to listen to? And if you're not listening to C-Tier DDR tracks then you're listening to what amounts to people dumping their amateur SoundClouds.

Something more objective to discuss is the actual mechanics for the rhythm-making of Cytus. You have a line that moves up and down across the screen and bubbles pop up all over the screen in time with the music. There are three types of notes/bubbles: Click notes you just tap, Hold notes you hold in a line, and Drag notes that are chained together in some pattern (straight line, zig-zag, etc) that you drag your finger along. It makes a lot more sense when you consider the game originated as a mobile game so playing with the Switch's touch screen is really the name of the game. If you play with a controller it feels both clunky and like cheating. The bubbles aren't positioned on a grid or in columns a la Guitar Hero so basically as long as you hit any button at the same time as a note it counts, allowing you to fully ignore the positioning of bubbles. With the touch screen it feels a lot more intuitive and you'll be tip-tapping and sliding your fingers in time to the beat in no time. And honestly when you got a song you're vibing to it's a hell of a lot of fun, especially when you start getting up to the manic 9 out of 9 difficulty songs.

My ideal for a rhythm game is one that has both a great soundtrack and where the controls translate to me feeling like I'm playing the music. The classic example is comparing songs in Guitar Hero between Expert, which contains all the played notes, and lower difficulties, which start to remove them. When you start removing played notes the "feel" is lost and with it the groove. The groove is everything. Along these lines Cytus has two problems. Problem 1: You are not playing a guitar or any single instrument. You are playing whatever the hell they want to map to inputs for the song. This means in a song like "Logical Steps" you will vacillate between playing one synth playing chords and then a different synth doing arpeggios with no warning and they're often interspersed together at the same time. Playing multiple instruments would be fine if you were playing everything but you're not playing everything. You're playing cherry-picked bits of a subset of instruments mixed together. As a result, songs like "Logical Steps" make me feel like I'm memorizing some abstraction on top of the song instead of grooving to the song itself. And it feels terrible. Problem 2: Drag notes are a cool little wrinkle--and to an extent define Cytus as a touch-based rhythm game--but they're used inconsistently. When there's a glissando (slide of notes down the scale) sometimes it will be a line of Click notes placed closely together and other times it will be a set of Drag notes across the screen at an angle. There's a joy in mastery with rhythm games, in knowing that when a certain sound or pattern comes up it will be represented in a similar way. No such luck here. Ultimately it feels like you never know how they'll transpose each song.

I get the vibe that what I value in rhythm games isn't the focus of Cytus. The focus of Cytus is not The Groove or The Not Listening To Bad Music, no it's about The High Score. Looking up some of these songs so I could link them in my review I see large amounts of comments focusing on the difficulty of songs. "This is the easiest one in the chapter." "This is too easy to be a 9." Bro, who cares? Did you have fun? Was it a good song? After every song you finish you can press a button and upload your score to the global leaderboard and the game will then tell you what rank you are globally. After being told for the 20th time I was not cracking the top 3000 for getting an "A" rank on a Hard song I stopped pressing that button. I'm not here to memorize songs and I'm not here to listen to songs I don't love over and over to get a high score. God bless if that's your bag but it ain't mine. Please carry on stomping on my pathetic scores.

Ultimately I'd say if you're down to sift through the chaff, there are some bangers. My fav's are the ones that stand out from the rest. You got the odd J-Pop track, a Super Mario Sunshine ass dance song, and the exceedingly rare jazz song. And honestly there's plenty more. Check it out and have fun covering your Switch's screen with fingerprints.

PS: I didn't have a place to discuss this but each song has art for it and one of the songs is called "It's a Wonderful World" and the cover art is a little girl holding a gun behind her back. One of the funniest things I've ever seen. The "analysis" on the wiki offers deep insight: "The meaning of the song is to show how the world is not so wonderful, with crime, war, disease, and related corruptions." Some absolute twelve-year-old-on-Tumblr-ass shit. Truly Wonderful.