Dead as Disco hits on the beat and hasn't let go

"Let me show you thirty minutes." That was the promise I made a friend who came over on Friday night, while my partner and daughter were off on the beaches up north and I had the place to myself. I had bought the game that morning, we put the controller down four hours later, and I never came up with much of an excuse for the extra three and a half. Dead as Disco has been renting space in my head ever since, at moments when I should be thinking about something else, and my weekend stretched itself out without asking.

Hit on time, not hard

Dead as Disco^[1] is a brawler you play like a rhythm game, where a punch, a dodge, or a finisher only counts if it lands on the beat. Brain Jar Games calls the system Beat Kune Do, a Bruce Lee pun that turns out to be an accurate job description, since the music doesn't back the fight so much as run it.

Our first hour went badly, and not in the way we were hoping. We mashed buttons the way you do in any action game, and the enemy waves took us apart, loss after loss, until one of us worked out that slowing down was the way to speed up. Something clicked after that, less in our hands than in our ears. I wrote a few weeks ago that Clair Obscur had taught turn-based combat to dance again, and I thought I was reaching for a metaphor. Here it's in the specification.

Two of the mistakes were ours alone. We had bothered to tame none of the skills the game kept handing us, and pride pinned us to the middle difficulty against the bosses when a relaxed setting exists for exactly this, learning their patterns while enjoying yourself instead of dying. I only worked that out the next day, alone, and the same bosses went down with insulting ease. History will record that I was tired the night before and that my real talent surfaced after a good night's sleep. Whether a little clarity about the game's systems also had something to do with it stays between us.

Ex-bandmates with more stage presence than most villains

You play Charlie Disco, a washed-up star from a band that ended badly, hunting down former bandmates who became Idols while the question of who killed the drummer hangs over everything. Each Idol owns a stage, a fighting style, and a soundtrack, and the four available so far^[2] have more charisma than almost any villain I've met this year. You reach them at the end of short levels cut like music videos, which is where PC Gamer found the best description anyone has managed, a brawl through music videos in the style of a kung-fu Baby Driver^[3].

Watching someone else play turns out to be about as good as holding the controller. We traded it back and forth all evening without either of us getting bored on the bench, because the art direction, the colors, and the soundtrack keep the spectator busy while the other guy gets dismantled in 4/4.

The music carries most of that, refusing to settle into one genre and jumping from K-pop to rock to rap with no warning^[4]. I don't shop in any of those aisles as a rule, and I still caught myself turning the volume up, because with a controller in your hands the stuff absolutely rips.

The challenges hurt, and that's the point

The game also stacks challenges alongside the story, and I'd point anyone who wants to actually understand it straight at them. They're spicy, occasionally unpleasant, and each one isolates a single mechanic and makes you drill it until your hands take over. I learned more in half an hour of challenges than in two story levels, which hasn't made me any fonder of them.

A free-play mode called Infinite Disco takes the idea further, stacking endless waves under rules you can bend, with your own imported music if you feel like it and a global leaderboard that shuts off the moment it smells a modified game^[5]. With a house selection that deep, I haven't felt the need to bring my own.

The completionist in me intends to unlock all of it, however many evenings that costs, even though a few of the challenges are simply cruel. One of them makes you fight two Idols at once, and I saw it through, with one or two stars out of five to show for it. I'll leave it there, since the pride of having done it at all covers me nicely.

Early access that doesn't feel like it

Dead as Disco has worn the early access label since May 5, and someone would have to tell me, because three days of heavy use produced no crashes at all. My one glitch was a scene transition that flickered before a boss, during a cutscene and never in the middle of a fight, which is nothing to hold against a game sold unfinished. The label is mostly there to flag what's missing, since the studio expects another year of work to finish the campaign and add Idols, moves, music, and a co-op mode^[6]. At least three of them are already visible behind their locks, and I watch them the way you watch for tour dates.

The game runs about twenty euros, a price Brain Jar Games warns will climb as the content grows, and players seem to agree with me, with more than seven thousand five hundred of them giving it 97 percent positive reviews on Steam as I write this. The press came around too, and IGN gave it an 8 out of 10 with one complaint I share, that the story is still thin^[3:1].

Now I have to work on my scores, a discipline I have never medaled in, having admired the stopwatch virtuosos strictly from a spectator's chair. And once co-op lands, my friend and I won't have to trade the controller anymore, which will strip our evenings of the only rest they had.