my new favourite rhythm game is Piano Typer, which weirdly is a "puzzle" from the 2022 Galactic Puzzle Hunt. I already liked STEREOtype but this is just absurd. And the idea of making people complete a rather difficult rhythm game quite late into an event that is nominally about solving puzzles is very funny to me.

I really like both these genres of game and I think this is largely because they occupy a very similar space in my brain. In my experience rhythm and typing games are, more than any other genre of game, concerned with the physicality of their input methods. In basically any other game the controller/keyboard is just a tool, and like any tool it quickly fades into the background once you get used to it;¹ you're not really thinking about pushing phsyical buttons, just about moving in the game world (or whatever else the game has you doing). But in these games the keyboard or weird rhythm game controller is always there, the whole point of the game is getting better and faster at interfacing with the physical thing in front of you, and you're never really allowed to forget it exists.

The gameplay of these genres sounds weirdly simple. In typing games you have to hit the correct string of buttons as fast as possible, in rhythm games you hit the button(s) at predetermined times. (Ok, there are games that are kind of typing games that use the keyboard more creatively than just having you type words and some rhythm games do all sorts of weird other stuff, and I like these games too but I'm making a point). I love this because it means all of the challenge is moved out of the game and into the physical world: can you type fast enough? Can you really, physically get in time with the music? Or tap along at an incredible speed?

And in all of this I feel it's so much about the physical world. You learn the positions of keys on the keyboard but also how to feel your way around it without looking, how to get your physical hands to push the buttons they need to without moving so much. Even in rhythm games that are more about music than about fast inputs, I tap along with the music physically and feel, say, the anticipation of an offbeat hit. On stuff that goes fast I love to hit the keys way harder than they need to be because I love the sound that my laptop keyboard makes when I really slam it. And then in games where you step on arrows on the ground - look you might not realise this if you've not played these, but in order to move one leg you have to put your entire weight on the other one. Charts for these games are generally designed so that you're always alternating what leg you move, so you're always shifting back and forth and occasionally have to cross one leg in front of the other or turn around or something (and you can apply this when playing these on keyboard by using two fingers and alternating hands, which is silly and fun). In order to hit two (or more) arrows at once you need to physically jump, or sort of turn diagonally, or in some cases just lean down and hit them with your hands. Despite how ridiculous this all is the game is still unforgiving in how it grades you; sure, some games with motion controls might make you spin around in a circle, but they don't generally make you do it at exactly the right time. These are serious games about doing nonsense, joyful physical things.

...Ok, I got a bit off track from Piano Typer. Honestly, it's not even a good rhythm game technically speaking. You can't adjust the input offset and it's a bit harder to read at times than it should be. But it is a worthy demonstration of its concept and I love it for that. It's a rhythm game where you use the whole keyboard and you have to understand the physical relationship between everything on it in order to succeed. I mean just look at this:

Ignoring the part where you have to type "beethoven" but with extra letters so it matches the melody (which is so hard but feels great when you get it), you have to mash ADG with one hand, JL with the other, and then move a row up so you can hit QET and UO, shift out of that pose so you can type a word, and then repeat in the opposite order.² And a row below this the pattern switches to ADGJL-ADGJL-QETUO-QETUO, and you can't just mash the entire row because this game punishes you for hitting extra letters (also I only have 5-key rollover so it wouldn't even work). This song is fast by the way! Piano Typer is about these patterns that are interesting to hit physically, and learning to do them quickly and consistently enough to fit it to music.

I'm not really going anywhere with this one. If you like rhythm and typing games for the same reasons as me you'll probably like this. Also the music is really good and I liked how they used the letters to put little jokes in the actual charts (like hitting out "CAN-CAN" at that one part of Orpheus in the Underworld that's used for the can-can (the dance)). It's fun!

Oh, and if you also like this sort of thing and know of any rhythm/typing-adjacent games that lean particularly hard into being about physicality, or even other types of games that in some way focus on it, I would love to hear your recommendations!

1: I was going to reference the "tools become an extension of the body" thing here because it's cool but apparently this might not technically be true.
2: This pattern only works on a QWERTY keyboard, but the game seems to have a good implementation for other keyboard layouts where patterns that are words are unchanged but stuff based on physical position of the keys is altered so you're hitting in the same place.