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.

PILOT TRAITS & PROGRESSION

We want pilots to be a meaningful part of the game rather than just a name and portrait that you occasionally assign to a mech. In our next update, the pilot system will receive a total overhaul.

Pilots will gain experience and level up based on their experiences in combat. A set of traits will gradually unlock with level progression. Available traits depend on class and differ between pilots. The effects of traits range from simple buffs to new abilities, making different play styles and pilot specialization more rewarding.

On top of progression, pilot states will become more complex. Pilots will gain fatigue from combat, receive injuries and even acquire unique negative traits if you mistreat them. We hope these additions (and more changes we aren’t yet ready to detail) will make your campaigns more interesting and would give you a reason to glance away from the shiny mechs, if only for a second!

OVERWORLD

We’re also improving the gameplay on the world map. Our original approach where the world was generated at the start of the campaign had its benefits, but made it difficult to achieve a balanced campaign experience. You could fight the same kind of an enemy over and over, miss some mission types entirely, run out of enemies during contests, etc. We reconsidered how we approach the world map and switched to a director system that will consider the history of your campaign and spawn missions that are most likely to be fresh and appropriate for the current phase of your quest. You won’t be locked to a single option and will continue to have agency over the direction you chart in your campaign, but we feel that the reworked generation will provide a much more varied and interesting experience to every player.

With these changes, we also took the opportunity to rework and improve almost every aspect of the overworld gameplay. You will be able to see all mission details, including potential rewards, right from the world map without entering briefings. Contest mechanics, escalation levels, dialogs, quests, unit repair & pilot healing, resupplying and more have been reworked to create a tighter, more interesting experience.

QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS

Finally, this next update will feature lots of quality of life improvements. Some of them include reworked pilot, briefing, debriefing and dialog screens; a quest system that guides you through the campaign and input hints. A new codex screen will help you remember or learn the myriad of mechanics present in the game without needing to restart your campaign to revisit one-time tutorials (in addition to some interesting lore!). We are also hard at work on adding gamepad support across the entire game.

SIGN UP TO PLAYTEST

We’re still a ways off from release, but we ARE gearing up to playtest rough versions of these changes. If you’d like to help shape this update, please join our Discord and sign up for the playtest here! We’re looking for players of all experience levels, from those who’ve never played PB before, to Brigadiers who mod their own mechs – each unique perspective is super valuable to us!

Last but not least, we really want to thank everyone for playing and supporting Phantom Brigade. Our review score has been steadily improving since launch, and it really means the world to us to see our updates be warmly received. We read every bit of feedback we get (special shoutout to players who submit in-game reports, that data is super helpful!) and it continues to shape our plans and work. Thank you Brigadiers!

— The Phantom Brigade Team (Artyom, Dakota, Pavel and Jaymee)

The post Next on Phantom Brigade: Pilots and Overworld appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

We’ve got less than a month to hit 200 pre-orders, SO, we’re also giving away a FREE Cobalt Core Steam key to the first 200 purchases!

Update 1.2 | Daily Challenges!

CONTENT:

Added a daily mode!

• Everyone playing that day’s daily share a crew, a ship, and a run seed. They also share 1-3 weird modifiers that make daily runs feel pretty different from normal runs!
• Dailies are scored! Compete with your friends on the Steam leaderboards!
• Daily runs are available after beating the game, OR by opting in early (and accepting that dailies may contain story/mechanic spoilers!)

Here’s a few examples of daily modifiers:

• One character only!
• Enemy ship parts are randomly shuffled at the start of every fight!
• Start with extra health, but most fights take place in Solar Flare events- you’re gonna need that extra health
• Cards can only be upgraded to their B upgrade
• Start with a free boss artifact

MISC:

• Ship health bars now have slightly darker ticklines every 5th tick, to make it easier to tell at a glance how much health an enemy has
• Made the card “Release” a dual card- you can now choose if the object you’re releasing is pointed TOWARD or AWAY from you

BUGFIXES

• Made it so getting the status “LOSE ALL YOUR EVADE NEXT TURN” plays a sad sound instead of a happy one
• Fixed some other really minor stuff that’s too boring to list

Bundles

For a short time, you can grab Cobalt Core for 25% to 33% off in these STACKED DISCOUNT BUNDLES!

Tactical Silliness Bundle (10%+)

Tactical Breach Wizards JUST LAUNCHED and is already Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam! If you’re a fan of some good ol’ turn based, tactical defenestration that tells a story both hilarious and heartwarming, then we literally can’t recommend this game enough. (Seriously, check out all the rave reviews they’re getting!)

Cute Card Battler Bundle (10%+)

Dicefolk is an ADORABLE roguelite with unique dice mechanics that’ll keep you coming back for more!

The post Cobalt Core Riggs Plushie + Daily Runs Update 1.2! appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.

Why a Break?

The team here at BYG is passionate about making games that are fun, challenging, and unique. A summer break lets everyone recharge, come back with fresh ideas, and tackle the rest of the year with renewed energy.

What Does This Mean for You?

• Support: While our official support channels will be monitored less frequently, we’ll still do our best to respond to urgent issues.
• Social Media: We’ll likely be a bit quieter than usual – talk soon!
• Development: Don’t worry, work on Rift of the NecroDancer, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Phantom Brigade, and our other projects will resume as soon as we’re back. We can’t wait to share more updates with you!

Thank You!

To learn more about our benefits like our summer break, check out our benefits page, and this interview with our CEO, Kimberly Voll, who talks about 4-day work weeks in BC.

We appreciate your understanding and continued support. Here’s to a fantastic summer for everyone! We’ll see you on the other side, refreshed and ready to dance to the beat of game development once more.

The post Brace Yourself Games is Taking a Summer Break! ☀️ appeared first on Brace Yourself Games.