The pitch of NotITG is that it's a DDR clone* where chart designers have access to some absolutely wild visual effects, and are encouraged to use these visual effects to make every chart a unique work of visual art and also make knowing what buttons to press rather difficult. Playing it is weird because it requires all the typical rhythm game skills but sometimes the arrows go sideways, or get covered up so you've got to read ahead and memorise a bit, or swap places so you have to read based on direction, or rotate so you have to ignore direction and only use position, or you get sent to the mirror dimension. That kind of thing.
What I find weird and unique to the game is the way that reading it is so heavily based on some sort of subconscious inference - never really knowing what to do next, but feeling it and just sort of doing it automatically. I think a lot of this comes from the way charts are designed to make sense when played on a physical pad; you can't really think out, mid-song, well, if the next arrow was up, you'd have to use the same leg twice and that'd muck up your balance, you can only do it. I play on keyboard using the index fingers on two hands to approximate the pad experience, and it's really weird how often I simply don't know what I'm doing but I'm finding all the right buttons anyway.
There are charts, like the one above, that look kind of impossible unless you're playing. The arrows are erratically moving in all sorts of directions instead of scrolling - how are you supposed to know when to hit them? And then later parts of this one where the screen is so obscured that it's almost impossible to see the actual arrows. Sometimes I play these and, yeah, I have no idea what to do and fail terribly. Sometimes I just somehow do it, as if I can see everything when I really can't. It's a bizarre feeling to be succeeding despite yourself and no other game has given me this experience so strongly.
* well it's a derivative of In The Groove (hence the name) which is built on the StepMania engine which is a direct clone of Dance Dance Revoluton, but that's not important






























