Rhythm Paradise Groove is the Whiplash of gaming

There is a natural rhythm to the world, and not only in the Ecclesiastes sense of a time to be born and die, to sow and to reap. It’s there in the swish-thunk of a car’s windscreen wipers, in the clacking relentlessness of a factory conveyor belt, in the rumble and flash of a lightning storm. In Rhythm Paradise Groove, Nintendo – whose designers are trained to find fun in unlikely places – turns these ordinary moments, and dozens more, into premises for play.

Each vignette is as succinct as a haiku. You’re presented with a cartoon scene and must work out how to press a button in time with the music, responding on the correct beat to complete some simple task. In one, a father tries to catch butterflies and grasshoppers as they flit across the screen, while his daughter helpfully calls out a sing-song cue to tell you when to act. In another, you play as a young woman chopping vegetables in her kitchen. Here, the button controls not the fall of her knife, but her attempts to catch tomatoes lobbed into the room by her partner.

You might play as a flexing weightlifter, who bounces fruit from one bicep to the other; the next moment, you’re one of four backing dancers performing behind a young matinee idol. Mistime a button press and you may take an elbow to the eye, eliciting boos.

The joy of the game – the latest entry in a series that began on the Game Boy Advance in Japan in 2006 – lies in this creative specificity. Each vignette translates an abstract rhythmic pattern into a different piece of physical comedy, and you must learn to interpret its peculiar visual and musical cues much as one learns to read a new form of notation. These are miniature games devised by brilliantly playful inventors, but there is observation beneath the absurdity: chopping, catching, lifting and dancing all possess rhythms of their own. The game makes them formal.

Make no mistake: for all its cartoon visuals and witty animation, this is an exacting test of timing. The smallest errors are met with the sort of withering disapproval familiar from the movie Whiplash, as characters wince, stumble or stare accusingly at your failure. Rhythm Paradise Groove begins gently, but by the end you’ll be required to execute fiendish runs of rhythmic tapping without dropping a beat. What looks like a collection of mischievous sketches eventually proves to be a rigorous musical challenge.

Photograph by Nintendo