Consider it for a second: What a perfect Zelda-ish word. Cadence! This word is a song and a river and a waterfall. It is cascading and it is radiance. It says there is a hidden order in nature and this order is beautiful – elegant and taut and melancholic and not to be messed with. Zelda is filled with wonderful words of its own devising. It has Hyrule, it has the Triforce. Here is a word of our own that fits perfectly. It has the right… it has the right cadence.
Cadence of Hyrule reviewDeveloper: Brace Yourself GamesPublisher: Nintendo/Spike ChunsoftPlatform played: SwitchAvailability: Out now
So much about Cadence of Hyrule feels like this: a meeting of distant worlds that results in something that just snaps together as if it was meant to be, that results in something harmonious. The pitch is gloriously weird: Crypt of the NecroDancer, a rhythm-action procedural dungeon-crawl is to be stirred together with Zelda, perhaps the least procedural game series of all time. In Zelda, nothing is ever left to chance, every outcome, every possible action has been foreseen. It’s almost a problem. The series’ defining moment, for me anyway, is that bit in Wind-Waker where Link travels beneath the surface of the Great Sea and finds Hyrule itself frozen in a bubble. Even after a deluge, even after the apocalypse, everything is in its place.
And yet it works. But it takes a bit of getting used to.
Here’s the idea. Cadence of Hyrule takes the world of Zelda and the combat of NecroDancer and makes them work together. You explore Hyrule as Link – or Zelda or Cadence, zapped in from a distant world, each character having their own special abilities and available in co-op – and it’s filled with recognisable landmarks like Lake Hylia and those muddlesome woods. But each screen of Hyrule is its own little combat encounter: a chunk of carefully designed terrain filled with baddies and treasure chests and – perhaps! – hidden areas and opportunities.
And you move to a beat here, yomping from one spot to the next in time with the lavishly reworked Zelda tunes, given an electro buzz one second and a disco bounce the next. Combat is automatic – you bump into enemies as if you’re clumsy on the dancefloor. In fact, as you move there’s often a dancefloor effect underneath you. Battling is all to do with timing and placement: you need to learn the rhythm of an enemy and then insinuate yourself into that rhythm, ducking around strikes, avoiding shields and getting the smack on your foes when they’re wide open.