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Cytus Alpha Review

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Cytus α 
• Developer: Rayark
• Publisher: Rayark
• Switch

Rayark has made a name for themselves in the rhythm game space. They’ve carved their space with games like VOEZ and Deemo on mobile and Vita, eventually bringing both to the Switch in updated, comprehensive packages that were even updated to add button support to interfaces intended for touchscreens. Cytus Alpha is the latest in this series, bringing Cytus’ complete tracklist and story into one game, alongside some guest tracks from the DJ Max series.

The presentation here is meticulous, with beautiful illustrations adorning the menus, and slick UI design that complements its futuristic setting. Cytus goes much heavier on the story than its predecessors, which each contained story elements, but never put a big focus on them. Here songs are organized into Chapters of the story, with your total score between them unlocking snippets of text on a narrative web. The main plot points are often unlocked long before you play all the songs with a chapter, allowing you to progress to the next chapter quickly, though alternative story bits can also be unlocked by aiming for greater completion.  

When the events of Cytus begin, a new program allowing people to download their consciousness into artificial bodies, called Operators, has just become viable. Naturally, this creates controversy and arguments about the ethics of the procedure ensue. Conversation around Operators and their regulation is abruptly interrupted when a deadly virus begins to kill off the population, prompting the widespread authorization for the use of Operators.  Here, Cytus hints at greater transhumanist themes, ideas of consciousness and class structure, though it goes underexplored. Part of this is the stories own limited ambitions, and part of it is the structure itself.

Story chapters only contain a few paragraphs of text each, which take the form of personal diary entries, news stories and even in world literature. It’s enough to give a broad picture of the world and get me interested, but some entries felt a lot more meaningful than others in terms of fleshing out the world and the plotlines. Because of the limited number of story entries, documents of the moments leading up to critical decisions points are given the same importance as a random person’s thought at a club.

Chapters themselves don’t offer much in terms of thematic coherence either. Because of the sheer number and variety of songs, chapters end up more as a collections of random songs rather than setting their own mood or feeling relevant to the current moment in the story. It’s clear Cytus Alpha’s ambitions lie more in its offerings as a rhythm game than the story it’s built its presentation around. Not a bad move, since it has a lot on offer there.

Like VOEZ before it, Cytus opts for a simple, clean presentation for its note charts, deriving novelty from its touch screen stylings. A line bounces between the top and bottom of the screen, with notes pulsing into view. Depending on the note type, you’ll have to perform either a press, hold, or slide in time to the line. It can get confusing compared to the standard note highway style, especially on harder difficulties where notes come in fast, but keeping an eye on the timeline can help sort it out and get a feel for it.

Button controls are supported as well, with a press of any face button mapping to press and hold notes, and holding any shoulder button performs slide notes. This simplifies your actions a lot, removing some of the nuance of the touchscreen controls and turning it into something akin to Taiko Drum Master. It’s clear this isn’t the intended way to play it, but it works well enough for when you want to play docked or while traveling, since there isn’t always good place to set down the Switch.

Compared to the elaborate presentations of titles like Beatmania or DJ Max, Cytus can feel a bit underwhelming, especially since there’s no direction connection to the charts to give you audio feedback on how well you’re playing. Visual feedback goes some way to make up for it, but there’s nothing as strong as impressive as VOEZ’s sliding notes. The plus side is that this creates a lot less work per song, and as such Cytus has an absurd number of playable songs–more than 200 hundred from the go, and possibly even more if previous titles are any indication of future support.

In hours of playing Cytus I don’t think I ever got close to playing every song in the game, and if it wasn’t for the extra story tidbits to unlock, I’d feel perfectly fine about skipping a lot of it. With so many songs and so much variety, there’s bound to be songs that you don’t care for, and honestly most of the tracklist I wouldn’t listen to outside of the game. But they work well enough for the high energy beat matching, and most of them are at least produced well enough that they were pleasant to play along to. I’m still working my way through all of it, but it’s a safe bet that the size of the track list just might bring me a list of favorites larger than the tracklist of other rhythm games.

Between Cytus Alpha’s presentation and sheer size, it ends up both overwhelming and underwhelming. The massive tracklist and hit or miss quality of it can make Cytus’ soundtrack feel almost disposable at the worst times. But at its best it manages to provide an endless setlist of strong vibes that pushes you forward with small tidbits of story. I wish there was more consideration given to the thematic cohesion of the package, but as a complete piece, it’s Rayark’s most compelling argument for the format yet.