Introduction
Friday Night Funkin’ is a free, in-development wacky rhythm game by ninja_muffin99 in the style of Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). When meeting a cute lady, things quickly escalate as her whole family shows up to face off in a rap fight to the death. If you can’t keep up with the lady’s family’s quirky rapping, you will instantly die!
Developer: ninja_muffin99
Price: Pay What You Want
Released: 1 November 2020
Platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac, Web
Available on: itch.io, Newgrounds
Engine: Haxe
Gameplay
Friday Night Funkin’s story mode takes place across four different weeks of escalating difficulty and a tutorial stage, all playable in Easy, Normal, and Hard modes. Each week includes two to three songs, played back-to-back. The game also includes a free play mode, allowing you to play any specific song on its own.
The gameplay screen is split into two halves, the left side for the opponent and the right for the player. As the song plays, the beats (signified by arrows) appear at the bottom of the screen and quickly approach the arrow signs at the top. When a beat is over any of the arrows on the right side, you press the respective button for the arrow to rap. Successful rapping will buy you some time, but failure will inch you closer and closer to dying. Depending on the difficulty you choose, there may be more and faster beats.
The game’s Normal mode will provide a fair challenge that you can practice mastering without being too unforgiving, although it still expects you have to decently fast reflexes to stay on-beat, especially with Week 2’s difficulty spike.
Artstyle and Audio
In addition to the over-the-top plot, the voices of the characters add a lot of wackiness to the game. Entire songs are made using high-pitched vocalizations rather than words, which differ from character to character. Combined with the extraordinary character design of the opponents (such as the fashion and the red eyes of the parents, or the quirkiness of the children), each encounter is made unique and adds to the WTF factor of Friday Night Funkin’.
In Conclusion
For a Pay What You Want game, Friday Night Funkin’ is a fun, peculiar game, with difficulty modes for casual players and hardcore veterans of the rhythm genre, that can take you about an hour to beat on average. On top of all that, the game is open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, meaning you can view the game’s source code or even modify it!
We played other musical games, too! Check out Geometry Dash, and Duet!