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On October 12, 2026, indie game developer RibCage Games released Alpha Nomos, a game which hopes to combine the fun of action roguelikes with the precision of rhythm games. In this title, players will take control of a marionette named Cello as they fight their way through a series of rooms with musical themed weapons as they face bosses and venture to save a village of toys similar to yourself. So is this game worth playing or should players listen to another track? Let’s dissect Alpha Nomos piece by piece and make the decision for ourselves.
Combat Which Blends Two Genres
Alpha Nomos’ gameplay is a mix of the character action and rhythm game genres. The player must attack enemies with various combos that involve both pressing the various attack buttons and waiting between presses to perform different attacks, but you are prevented from spamming these combos as the amount of damage you do is determined by how on-beat your button presses are to the game’s music.
Luckily, if you aren’t the best at striking solely to the rhythm like me, the game has an on-screen metronome (with six different selectable appearances to suit your tastes) that you can time your button presses to. It even has red notes that indicate an enemy attack so you can dodge accordingly.
The first impression that Alpha Nomos will give the player will sadly not be the best as the game’s starting weapon, the Xyloblades, are quite weak and will take many strikes to kill even the weakest enemies in the game. Thankfully, it won’t be too long before the player can obtain better weapons such as the Saxword which can clear rooms in a reasonable amount of time.
Of course, being able to defeat enemies in a few strikes doesn’t inherently mean you’re safe, as you have very little health and a few missteps into enemy attacks will see you dead. Getting a hang of the game’s combat can be quite difficult if you go into it with the wrong mindset.
Alpha Nomos’ combat is at its best when the player treats it less as an action game and more as a rhythm game. While trying to avoid enemy attacks and strike at them based on the game’s visual animations would leave me dead within a few rooms of each run, relying on the game’s audio and simply hitting the buttons along with the in-game metronome allowed me to complete several runs without getting hit a single time.
Treating it as a rhythm game may have increased my enjoyment of the combat and let me enjoy a few runs, but it also brings one of the game’s other shortcomings to the forefront. While it is cool that your weapon will make a musical noise when you hit enemies, it gets incredibly old really fast to hear the same five or six notes on repeat every combo.
The actual soundtrack that you’re attacking to the beat of gets completely drowned out by your own attacks. It becomes clear incredibly fast that the metronome is less of an accessibility feature and more of a required element of the game design, as I do not know how someone would play through the game without this visual indicator of when it attacks.
Overall, it feels hard to really compliment the combat of Alpha Nomos. Despite really enjoying the concept and thinking that it has potential, both its action game and rhythm game elements feel flawed in ways that make it really difficult to parse through.
Underdeveloped Roguelike Elements
Alpha Nomos’ gameplay loop sets itself firmly into the roguelike genre. Each run through the forest, the player will have to go through a series of combat challenge rooms which will reward them with three potential power ups, of which you get to pick a single one before choosing one of two rooms to travel into next.
Picking the same power up multiple times in the same run will strengthen it, with one of the game’s neatest features being how each power up has multiple different branches in how it upgrades. Although most of these are passive buffs, it is undeniably satisfying to repeatedly upgrade your damage over time to properly siphon the health of bosses.
Sadly, despite that upgrade novelty, these roguelike elements are one of the weakest aspects of the game. While you can upgrade your weapon with plugins and get various attack boosting upgrades, there is actually a very small number of upgrades that the player can actually obtain during a run.
With there only being a handful of upgrades, the choices that you make every run will be more or less identical to your previous one, with the only differences being in how soon you’ll be selecting the Aerial Damage +7% upgrade before getting the
I won’t judge the game too harshly for this as when it comes to my taste in roguelikes I would rather have less variety in a challenge that is always achievable over a veritable museum of different power up choices where my run will be entirely decided over how lucky I am.
The lack in variety doesn’t end at the power ups you’re collecting however, as it also extends to the actual areas you’ll be traveling through. Alpha Nomos is a game with fun and vibrant character designs, but dull and uninspired environments. Every area in the forest looks the same, every area in the industrial area looks the same, so on and so forth.
Within a single run through a location you’ll have seen everything its environment has to offer. Which makes the fact that the game constantly throws you back to town after boss encounters, for a brief bit of story, so you can then run through the exact same areas once again an agonizing exercise in repetition.
Technical Flaws
In addition to my issues with Alpha Nomos’ gameplay loop, there are also technical issues that plagued the experience. Despite being a musical game with a heavy emphasis on audio, I noticed that the sound effects for my attacks would semi-frequently cut out. This wasn’t a major issue as the metronome that I was using to time my attacks was still audible in these moments, but it did take me out of the experience multiple times.
Another problem I had with the game is that it seems the way it tracks progression is broken at this moment. No matter how many runs I completed, my save file on the title screen continued to read “0%” completed throughout my entire time playing the game. This also extended to the game’s achievements, as I was unable to earn any of them, not even the one for clearing the tutorial and entering town for the first time.
Those issues are overall minor, even if they did detract from the game experience. However, my biggest issue with Alpha Nomos is one that I would consider to be experience ruining at times: The game’s loading issues.
Every time the player enters an area there will be a small delay between them entering and the area’s enemies/items spawning in. While it’ll only be a few second long delay each time, it really begins to drag on your patience inside of the smaller rooms as you stand by the exit waiting for the items to spawn before you can leave.
On rare occasions, these issues will even extend to softlocking the game. Twice I had to prematurely end a run through no fault of my own as the game simply didn’t load any items in, preventing me from continuing to the next room.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to describe Alpha Nomos as a technical mess, these issues still plagued my entire playthrough of the game and were the cherry on top of what was overall just a middling experience from start to finish.
Closing Thoughts
Giving a negative review to this game makes me feel bad, as I think Alpha Nomos is a game with a great concept from a clearly dedicated development team. I really enjoy the character design of the game’s protagonist and other characters, but this cool idea and fun designs are dragged down by a gameplay loop that leaves a lot to desire, roguelike elements that are underdeveloped, and technical issues that drag those elements down even further.
As it stands, Alpha Nomos is not a game I can currently recommend due to its many design issues. While it is far from the worst game released this year, it just isn’t up to snuff currently. Despite my disappointment with this title, I have hopes that these developers will continue to improve in the future.
Alpha Nomos
Bottom Line
Alpha Nomos is sadly a disappointment. Despite its incredibly interesting concept, the actual gameplay just doesn't hold up compared to other recent roguelike releases. Both the action game elements and the rhythm game elements of the combat feel underdeveloped and lead to an experience that never feels better than just "Okay" With very little variety between runs and technical issues also dragging the game down, I find it incredibly hard to recommend this game to others
