Some games pry open a specific drawer in your memory where you keep things you forgot you were keeping. Nocturne, the decade-in-the-making rhythm RPG from Benjamin Pracy and his tiny Canadian studio, Pracy Studios, started rummaging through mine when I first tried its demo during Steam Next Fest 2026 and hasn’t stopped.
While playing, I kept thinking of Clannad, the Key visual novel-turned-anime that slings grief and the afterlife together with the precision of a scalpel, and which I had not thought about in years before this game dragged it back to the surface.
The association isn’t random, as Nocturne is set in a digital afterlife called Maya that has been masquerading as paradise while falling into corruption and chaos. It’s got a gentle wrongness that caught me off guard in exactly the right way, the same way a certain kind of handheld JRPG used to when I was still fuelling up on cartridges and good intentions.
You play as Karma (they/them), the first new arrival in a thousand years to wake up in Maya and find it decaying around them. Your brother Spencer reached the afterlife before you did, and finding him is the driving personal question underneath all of the larger mysteries: who is Nocturne, what triggered the collapse, who controls the corruption, and why does a half-moon sit emblazoned on your shirt like a badge from a club you don’t remember joining.
You are immediately befriended by Kimothy, a headstrong small boy who is the best character in this game, and I am not accepting counterarguments, and by Satoru, a wise elderly fish in monk’s robes who speaks in cryptic half-truths and whose husband was deleted by an Admin of Maya, which is a detail that broke my heart and fired up my rage and filled up my brain with questions in equal measure.
Key Details
- Developer: Pracy Studios
- Publisher: Pracy Studios
- Platform: PC (Steam)
- Release Date: September 24, 2026
- Price: $19.99 USD
- Genre: RPG / Rhythm
- Recieved Code: Yes, for PC
Every Fight Is a First Listen
The rhythm combat is the reason I picked up Nocturne and, without reservation, the reason I stayed. Each of the enemies (of which there are 101, I hear!) carries their own original track, and each of those tracks has three progressively harder melodic variations, so even when you are fighting the same corrupted stag for the fifth time because you’ve clumsily wandered past them again, the music never accrues into something stale or punishing.
I played Nocturne‘s Prelude when the demo first dropped and found it pleasantly manageable on Novice, so when I booted up the full game I chose Adept, which was ambitious of me in the way that having a fourth cup of coffee at 6 pm is ambitious: confident in the moment, consequences deferred.
The jump between those two difficulty modes is a shove off a ledge. Adept fights have me toiling to siphon every last bit of focus into four scrolling lanes of notes while the enemy’s energy bar charges, the platform flashes gold to signal my window to stagger them, and I try not to forget that I also need to manage my health bar and time my own attacks. All at once, all to the music, and the music never lets you settle.
The boss tracks, recorded live by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra, operate on an entirely different emotional tier, and when I tell you I missed half the notes on my first major boss because I was busy having a feeling about the music, I need you to understand that, to me, is a design success.
And then there are the meditation sequences, where you cleanse Maya’s corruption through a rhythm mini-game that shifts and tangles the note lanes around you mid-pattern in many, many creative ways, which is the most playfully nefarious thing this game does. I have not once gotten an A score. I am chuffed about this.
Maya Is Falling Apart and So, a Little, Am I
The story underneath all of this is one I am genuinely invested in. Karma and Kimothy’s dynamic is written in a casual register that never panders and somehow still manages to pull at things, and it earns its warmth without announcing that it is doing so. Something about the way this world is built galvanised that same quiet ache I remember from Clannad, and I am still working out how a pixel art RPG managed that.
The places where the writing hasn’t quite earned that weight are specific. There is a storyline about creatures being subjugated and tortured, and it is blabbed to me through dialogue rather than shown through the world, which leaves it feeling told and not felt.
Plus, the supporting cast beyond Kimothy and Satoru remains a little muddied at the midgame mark, though I suspect the story is still accruing toward something and I’m content to wait.
Tragically, There Is No Waypoint for This
Nocturne has no map, no minimap, no quest log, and no waypoints, which is a deliberate homage to the late 90s and early 2000s RPGs that inspired it, and I understand the choice intellectually while resenting it personally.
Getting lost is not the problem. Getting lost and then having to fight through respawning enemies in the same environs because I’ve wandered the wrong corridor three times in a row is where the fondness muddied into something more frustrated.
The crucial thing I want to make clear is that I chose to fight every random encounter I found this entire game, eagerly and without complaint, because the rhythm mechanic made each one feel worth it. Being forced to repeat them because I couldn’t locate the exit is a different feeling entirely, and the former doesn’t excuse the latter.
It would have been nice to have just one of those elements. Preferably, a quest log to give me a gentle nudge in a direction. That is the only tithe I’m asking Nocturne to waive.
Verdict: 9/10
Nocturne isn’t some small fry passion project that happened to land well. It is a specific, lovingly constructed experience built on a genuinely brilliant mechanical hook, arriving after nearly a decade of development with the kind of craft that makes that timeline feel justified.
The rhythm combat is the best version of itself I could have imagined, the music is extraordinary, Kimothy deserves the world, and the story holds enough mystery to keep me pushing through its more uneven beats.
**Bonus Action recieved a copy of Nocturne for PC for the purpose of this review**
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