Rhythm Doctor: a pulse-pounding can of Pringles

by Adelaide Song on 2025-12-23.
Tags: video games rhythm

Spoilers follow.

At the start of my work’s Christmas break I became possessed by some kind of rhythm demon. There isn’t really any other explanation for why I decided to just knock a couple of my most anticipated rhythm games off my backlog—at the catastrophic cost of my sleep schedule—but at least I’m getting some content out of it.

Rhythm Doctor started life as a Flash game of all things, which you can definitelysee with its exceptionally simple primary gameplay mechanic: count to 7 and press a button. Almost any button on your keyboard will work. It’s so easy even a drummer could do it. Armed with nothing more than your spacebar and your internal metronome, you are tasked with defibrillating a crowd of different patients, each of them bringing a new gameplay malady to the table. Each one also comes accompanied by a little nugget of narrative that strings this series of bangers into a tidy medical procedural.

There are a few flavors of storyline, but Rhythm Doctor’s most substantial and consistent throughline is about burnout and unhealthy relationships with work. From that alone you can understand why it makes so much sense to set it in a hospital. Real-life rotations are already nightmarish enough at the best of times—anything that involves the phrase “27-hour shift” should scare you—and the domineering workaholic Dr. Gabriel Edega only makes things even worse for our two protagonists, Paige and Ian. He continually places comically unreasonable expectations on the both of them, and in doing so, directly worsens almost every situation he’s involved with.

One of the game’s most consistent and impressive strengths is how it ties a distinctly non-musical plotline like this into rhythm game mechanics. His bullying makes Paige so stressed that she develops the same cardiac issues as the other patients, complete with swing rhythms which in-universe correspond to blocked blood flow. He terrorized Mark for so long that he literally jumpscares the player during 6-2, and his behavior is likely the reason that Mark’s heartbeat has been shortened to 5 instead of 7 beats as seen in the rest of the game. 7-1 also implies that this insane workload he placed on both himself and Mark had the same effect on Edega’s health, as he also has a 5-beat rhythm during the call-and-response sequence of that song. He just has the willpower to somehow continue working under this much pressure—thus, the expectation that others around him also do the same.

Maybe the most clever integration of gameplay mechanics into the game’s story is Edega forcing Paige to defibrillate Mark during 6-X. During this sequence she’s made to use the same button the player does on Normal mode, while through the rest of the game she uses the one corresponding to Easy mode, which offers greater input leniency. (By contrast, canonical gamer Ian uses the Hard mode button instead.) Ian makes it clear that Paige’s primary role is to take care of patients outside of rhythm treatment, so her poor sense of rhythm shouldn’t even be relevant to her work. None of this matters to Edega, however, whose bloody-minded focus on efficiency has caused him to slash staffing down to the skeleton crew of Ian, Paige and you. The only way this nightmare system has any chance of working is if everyone can do every job the way Edega can: thus, Paige is fired, and Ian is required to automate the role she left behind, all at the direct expense of quality of care.

Are any of the storylines particularly revolutionary? No, but they make me happy for the same reason that eating fresh bread with butter makes me happy. A relatively completionist playthrough with all main and B-side song completions on Normal took me four and a half hours, including plenty of time for me being bad and failing levels. For a video game, that’s frankly not a lot of space to work with, more like a short story than a novella. The rhythm game format also imposes a hard upper limit on how much time you can spend on each plot beat, at least not without introducing pacing and difficulty issues.

As such, Rhythm Doctor leans hard into that popcorn style of storytelling, and the result really does feel like a medical drama. Each patient has immediately understandable and sympathetic struggles that play out over a few unbelievably snappy and satisfying levels. They’re not exactly Tolstoy characters, but they’re charming and unique in their own ways, aided by cute sprites and great voice work, and the simple stories can be told completely and competently in the nine or so minutes of screen time each gets. And, man: all this yapping about the writing of a rhythm game and we haven’t even got to the music.

You know how hard it is to basically write Cats in the ER universe¹? You know how hard it is to do that in 7/4? You know how hard it is to make that sound genuinely catchy and fun? I don’t know how many of these songs I’ll be able to fit in my already extremely-crowded rotation, but there are plenty of highlights across a wide variety of genres. There’s chill, loungy numbers like the acoustic “Intimate”—a melody so good it got spun off in UNBEATABLE² as unofficial Sal Jiang theme song “Loner”—straight up Avicii-esque EDM in “All the Times”, the instantly iconic baseball rock ballad “One Slip, Too Late”… The team at 7 Beat Games tries their hands at a lot of sonic palettes and they’re all at least “very good.” As good as they are to listen to alone, credit must be given to the mapping³ team for cues that are as infectious as the songs themselves. I can’t hear “One Slip, Too Late” without my brain autocompleting the subdivision pops during the chorus.

Fittingly, the closing levels of the story are loaded with my favourite songs. 6-2, 6-X, 7-1, 7-X is a white-hot string of bangers that culminates with an absolutely incredible reprise of the story’s major sonic motifs. It’s a true Remix 10 and it’s unbelievably satisfying to play and to listen to. The window manipulation gimmick that pops up in a couple of the other boss fights reaches its final form here to spectacular effect.

In case it wasn’t clear enough, I adore this game. Maybe the only caveat I have in recommending it is concerns about difficulty: I am a relatively experienced rhythm gamer who’s played everything from DDR to Taiko to Guitar Hero, and I have had multiple years of formal musical experience. I played on Normal throughout and was getting my ass absolutely beat by some of these levels, especially any ones requiring multi-tasking. That said, none of them really felt unfair once I got a couple more reps in, and you can build muscle memory for even very knotty B-sides relatively quickly.

For a newcomer to the genre, I genuinely wonder if this would be a very good entry point alongside Rhythm Heaven. Its one-input gimmick lowers the bar to entry considerably compared to something like Osu!, which is famously so aim-intensive that it’s often used as an aim trainer first, rhythm game second. The majority of songs also last on the order of 2 minutes; there are no 10-minute slogs required to get through the campaign. If you’re having trouble, in addition to the Easy mode, there’s plenty of excellent full-clear footage for the game online you can use to learn input rhythms for each section. Multitask sections in particular are also much simpler to learn if you can hear how they’re meant to be played together, rather than having to just go off of each patient’s separate cues.