But instead of existential d(r)ead, we’re bringing you gifts! In the spirit of cross-game pollination (and because we thought it would be super cool), we’re sneaking THREE legendary tracks from Crypt of the NecroDancer into Rift:

• Crypteque

• Fungal Funk

• Power Cords

And because looking good is half the battle (especially when facing down a horde of skeletons), these songs feature new Crypt outfits for Cadence and the NecroDancer. Now you can bring that classic Crypt style to your Rift runs.

Thanks for sticking with us through all the beats and bobs. Here’s to another ten years of rhythmic mayhem!

New ALL-TIME LOW discount on the Crypt of the NecroDancer Ultimate Pack for the next 48 hours!

The post Happy 10 years of NecroDancing! 🥳🎂 appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

And that’s not all! Keep the musical combat flowing with the paid DLC, Celeste Music Pack, strawberry jam-packed with four iconic tracks from the award-winning Lena Raine:

• Scattered and Lost
• Reach for the Summit
• Confronting Myself
• Resurrections

To celebrate, we’ve also added a FREE Rhythm Rift to the base game for everyone:

• Resurrections (Remix) by Danny Baranowsky

You’ll get to rock out with Madeline or Badeline in each new track. Buy individual tracks, or grab the Celeste Music Pack bundle for 25% off.

Already own Crypt of the NecroDancer on Nintendo Switch or Steam? You get a BONUS 10% off Rift of the NecroDancer, on top of our 10% launch discount!

Get 25% off the songs if you buy the whole Music Pack on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Or complete the set on Steam for an additional 10% off!

The post Rift of the NecroDancer Launches on Switch with Celeste Music Pack! appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

• Slugger’s Refrain
• Got Danged
• Bootus Bleez

Get 10% off the Rift of the Meat Boy Steam Bundle

You can also listen to the OFFICIAL new Super Meat Boy track on Spotify!

The post Free Super Meat Boy Content Drop! appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

Get 10% off until Tues Feb 11

Rift of the NecroDancer Steam Page

Extra 10% off if you buy it with (or already own) these titles!

Extra 10% Off – Crypt of the NecroDancer Bundle

Extra 10% Off – Just Shapes & Beats Bundle

Extra 10% Off – Rift of the NecroDancer OST Bundle

You can also listen to the OFFICIAL Rift of the NecroDancer soundtrack on Spotify here!

What Press Think

“Innovates on some of the genre’s best ideas.” – IGN

“One of the best rhythm games I’ve ever played.” – Digital Trends

“A game that will absorb rhythm game fans for a long time, with clever gameplay and, more importantly, a sensational soundtrack.” – God is a Geek

“An easy recommendation for anyone wanting to take on its challenges.” – Game Rant

What YOU Think

We really wanna know! Come join our Discord for maximum launch hype vibes! We’re also on Bluesky now too! We’ll also be closely monitoring in-game bug reports.

This is just the beginning for Rift, and we’re so excited to be on this journey with y’all! You can also hang with us TODAY at our launch livestream with Klei at 2:00 PST.

P.S. The best way to support us is to grab the game during launch week, but if you wanna go the extra mile, we’ve also released a Supporter Upgrade with a couple cute cosmetics

Supporter Upgrade

Thanks for grooving!

With love,

The Brace Yourself Games team

The post Rift of the NecroDancer is Out Now! appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

Rift of the NecroDancer is almost done

Rift of the NecroDancer is coming along nicely. As of now, the game is pretty much content complete, and we’re having a blast playing it. It’s been awesome to see everyone’s reactions to our demo too!

BUT… (you knew there was a “but,” didn’t you?)

To hit a 2024 launch date, we would have needed to do some serious crunch to polish and bug-fix. Here at Brace Yourself Games, we’re all about a sustainable groove, not the grind. We believe in making awesome games without sacrificing our team’s well-being.

We decided to avoid cutting certain features to hit a 2024 launch date and possibly being forced into releasing something half-baked. So, we’re taking a deep breath, stepping back, and giving Rift of the NecroDancer just a LITTLE bit more time in the oven.

One of the things we’re doing to give ourselves a little more time is decoupling Steam launch from additional platforms. This means that we’ll launch on Steam first, and follow on console at a later date. That date is still TBD, but we’re ready to share the Steam launch date, so keep reading!

What’s taking so long?

You might be saying, “Brace Yourself Games, you already announced a delay last year. What’s going on? I want to play this game already!!!”

To that, I say SAME. But let me give you a little insight into what we’ve been doing this last year, and why we need just a couple more months.

• IMPOSSIBLE Difficulty. The game was originally going to just have EASY, MEDIUM, and HARD, but we decided to add a fourth difficulty level: IMPOSSIBLE (previously known as EXPERT). IMPOSSIBLE is uh… really hard. We want a little extra time to tune this so it’s not actually impossible, right? But it’s still going to be really hard.
• More Rhythm Rifts. We added even MORE Rhythm Rift beatmaps to songs like the boss battle tracks.
• Off-beat Readability. The readability of off-beat monsters is probably our number one most received piece of feedback. We’ve been doing a lot of experimenting and playtesting to get this to a state we’re happy with.
• Custom Music Tools. Thanks to the help of the dev behind Crypt of the NecroDancer: SYNCHRONY DLC, we did a full revamp of Rift’s internal level editing tool. Not only that, but we’re preparing it to be released publicly at launch so you can all use this tool to create custom charts to custom songs.
• Remix Mode and Daily Challenges. Remix Mode started off as one of those “wouldn’t it be cool if…” ideas that ended up actually being REALLY COOL. The TL;DR of Remix Mode is that it throws a fresh chart your way every playthrough while retaining the original level’s rhythmic design. That makes Daily Challenges possible, by changing up the circumstances for each song. And we love Daily Challenges. We’d love to do a more in-depth blog about Remix Mode soon to talk about the nuances of developing Remix Mode!
• Tutorial and Practice Mode Improvements. We’ve made a lot of improvements to our tutorials and practice mode based on feedback we received from the demo. The tutorials are more comprehensive, and we also added in a highly request slowdown functionality (up to 50%) into practice mode to help you better parse difficult patterns in high BPM songs.
• Animation Clarity and Feel. We’ve gone through a bunch of iterations on character/monster animations throughout development. If you take a look at our very first trailer and compare it to the demo, you’ll see what a massive difference it is!
• Background Visualizers. Technically no one asked for this, but this is something that we really wanted to do, and we discovered it adds a lot more visual variety to each Rhythm Rift, which helps us and content creators make better videos.
• Boss Battle and Story Revamp. We felt there was room for improvement with the state of boss battles and story mode, so we decided to give these aspects a total facelift.
• Shine Factor. We’ve addressed the majority of our high-impact bugs, but we want to make sure this game is polished to a mirror sheen!

With all that said…

Rift of the NecroDancer is launching February 5th, 2025.

We’re so confident in this new date that we’re announcing it right now. No more “coming soon” or vague windows. Mark your calendars, folks, because the NecroDancer is opening the Rift on February 5th, 2025.

There you have it. We know it’s a bit of a wait, and we are so grateful to have a community like you that trusts in us enough to let us cook for as long as we need. In the meantime, our Steam demo is still up, so if you haven’t checked that out, you should definitely give it a shot. We’ll also keep you updated with behind-the-scenes peeks, and dev content. If you have any questions or just want to hang out with us while we finish this game, you should join our Discord. It would also be a great help to our team if you add Rift of the NecroDancer to your wishlist.

Thanks for your understanding, your patience, and your endless enthusiasm for all things NecroDancer. We can’t wait to share this game with you.

The Brace Yourself Games Team

The post The Rift Opens February 5, 2025 appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

If you haven’t had a chance to play yet, you can play the demo here.

The post Thanks for making Rift a top 50 demo during Steam Next Fest! appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

Thank you everyone for over 150,000 wishlists and 50,000 demo downloads so far! We are truly blown away by your support.

New demo, new trailer!

Across these two weeks, we recorded 45,905 hours played! INSANE!

The most played chart in the previous demo was Ravevenge feat. Aram Zero by Alex Moukala on Hard, at a whopping 372,812 attempts in just two weeks, followed by Ravevenge on Medium, and Amalgamaniac on Hard.

Ravevenge on Medium was also the most failed song, with 97,401 fails.

We also recorded a total of 405,593 quick retries throughout the whole demo. I see some perfectionists out here!

The hardest monster for players to hit was the shielded black skeleton, with 7.56% missed! Those are some tricky fellas.

Blademasters were a close second, with 6.38% missed.

We recorded 88.32 MILLION True Perfect hits across these two weeks! WOW! Good going y’all.

There were 239,773,765 total inputs in the demo during this time period.

The most common Rank players achieved was A Rank, with 37.3% of all ranks being A!

4.9% of scores were S+ (previously SS).

Those are the fun stats we have to share! Thank you all so much again for playing our demo. Your feedback and enthusiasm have helped so much. We hope you’ll enjoy the Next Fest demo even more! Don’t forget to wishlist and try the new demo if you haven’t yet. It helps us out a lot!

Also, if you’re enjoying the music, you can find the new demo songs on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and more.

The post Thank you for 150,000+ wishlists and 50,000+ demo downloads! appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

Crush hordes of classic NecroDancer baddies as they surge from the Rift. Each monster has unique behaviours like bats that shift lanes when attacked, and tougher foes take multiple hits to dispatch!

This demo contains 3 songs, playable in EASY, MEDIUM, and HARD difficulties:

• Disco Disaster by Danny Baranowsky
• Amalgamaniac by Alex Moukala
• RAVEVENGE ft. Aram Zero by Alex Moukala

Leaderboards are enabled, so see you stack up against other players around the world, and share your results in our Discord server.

Additionally, Crypt of the NecroDancer (80% off) and Cobalt Core (25% off) are on sale this week, and they are included in several bundles throughout Klei Fest for STACKABLE DISCOUNTS. If you’ve ever wanted to get any of the following games, now’s the time!

All bundles this week:

• Klei Fest Bundle (50%+)
• NecroDancer Essential Bundle (40%+)
• Deck Mastery Duo (25%+)
• Rhythmic Rampage Bundle (10%+)
• Procedural Peril Bundle (10%+)

The post Rift of the NecroDancer Demo Out Now! appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

If you missed the Beeps N Bops livestream, we’ve got a recap of this awesome performance to share. This show features Danny B performing some of his songs from Rift of the NecroDancer LIVE, and he even snuck some unreleased songs into his set!

Development for Rift of the NecroDancer is still full steam ahead with plans to release this year. Once we have more details we’ll be sure to share them with you all. Stay tuned!

The post Danny Baranowsky LIVE Performance appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

Danny Baranowsky

First, it wouldn’t be a NecroDancer game without a banging soundtrack from Danny Baranowsky. If you liked Danny B before, this soundtrack will really make your head roll.

Jules Conroy (FamilyJules)

Second, Jules Conroy (aka FamilyJules) has been a part of NecroDancer from the beginning. It wouldn’t feel the same without him. You’ll get some of his signature metalmania in the soundtrack, but get ready to hear a different side of our favorite funky-haired shredder.

And now, please welcome four new composers to the NecroDancer family!

Josie Brechner

Josie Brechner is a prolific composer with a history of inventive and novel compositions for many indie games, brings that inventiveness to NecroDancer with a vast range of genres, and may have even invented some new ones?!

Sam Webster and Nick Nausbaum

Sam Webster‘s work on Grindstone was one of the best soundtracks of the year when it came out, and we were thrilled when we reached out and Sam agreed to write some tracks for Rift. Sam brought Nick Nausbaum in to assist, and together they’ve delivered a hefty pack of delicious grooves that somehow feel simultaneously frenetic and chill.

Alex Moukala

And finally, we’ve been fans of Alex Moukala for a long time from his kickass funky bass covers, and his energy and musical feel felt like a natural fit for NecroDancer. Get ready to be blown away by Alex’s ferociously melodic, intricate, and intense tracks.

Listen to the Rift of the NecroDancer 2023 EP on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and more!

Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on YouTube

The post Rift of the NecroDancer 2023 EP Release and Composer Reveal appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.