Rhythm Doctor One button, one beat, one save

The whole game runs on a single press: hit the spacebar on the 7th beat of a patient's heartbeat. That is all. Then the game gets to work. Patients arrive with heartbeats built on polyrhythms, hemiolas, irregular time signatures, held beats and missing beats. You treat two people at once in different rhythms. You hold a beat down. You hit on the 5th instead of the 7th. Somewhere along the way you realize you have learned actual music theory without noticing.

Each of the 20+ handmade levels carries its own story, and together they form one storyline about the doctors and patients of a busy hospital. You play a remote intern, and the people you treat have lives and troubles of their own: plot threads that seem separate at first slowly cross paths as the acts go on. Cutscenes weave into the levels themselves, and the music does narrative work, with lyrics and rhythm tied to what is happening on screen. The story can genuinely move you; more than one player admits to getting misty at the finale. It is funny too, in a dry, self-aware way.

The entire story can be played in drop-in drop-out local co-op: a friend can pick up a second controller at any point in any level and join you at the defibrillator. Two people counting the same seven beats, one of them drifting, both blaming the other when a patient flatlines: it turns a focused rhythm game into a shared, slightly chaotic evening. For a co-op night, few games are this easy to set up and this hard to put down.