Developer: Floppy Club
Price: $5/£5 per month [First world free]
Size: 472.9 MB
Version: 1.19
Platform: iPhone & iPad

Rytmos

Originally launching on Switch and PC a couple of months ago, Floppy Club’s Rytmos feels like it has found its natural place on iPhone.

As much a case of tasteful music curation and stylish Monument Valley-like presentation as it is a line-drawing logic puzzler, Rytmos really is operating on another plane to most other iOS brain teasers.

Each isometric Rytmos puzzle is a case of drawing a path that joins a starting point to three pegs, then closing the loop. Said loop can cross over itself, but you can’t retread any old ground.

The challenge comes from the various tight arenas in which you must operate, as well as from a series of modifiers like portals and sliding ice cubes, which technically help your progress, but which also serve to muddy the waters.

Where Rytmos really excels is in the way that this solidly simple path-drawing mechanic has been tied so closely to Musical discovery. Each joined peg and completed loop contributes to a minimalistic musical composition, adding percussion, slide guitar notes, or synth stabs.

As you complete each puzzle in a series – each one forming a side of a cube – the core composition fills out and takes shape. There’s the sense that you’re constructing a piece of music, even though the link between the two elements is pretty abstract.

The musical theme runs deep, with each batch of levels themed after a particular musical movement. You might puzzle your way around a series inspired by German kosmische musik, or add tones to an unfurling Ethiopian jazz melody.

Upon completing a cube, you’ll be offered the ability to freestyle on a simplified instrument, and even record your accompaniment to the underlying tune. This latter element isn’t quite as fully realised as it could be, with an odd sense of lag between your inputs and the ensuing sound, but it’s intended more as a delightful distraction than the main course.

Floppy Club’s presentation is superb, from the interplanetary layout of the levels to the bold blocks of colour that form each cube. There’s also delight in the way that wrapping up each level results in a vinyl record being placed back into a box, as if your puzzling is a form of cosmic crate digging.

Rytmos is a simple but beautifully executed puzzler that soars to new heights on the back of its musical theme. It looks, plays, and sounds delightful, and it might just teach you a little something along the way.