Introduction
Rhythm heaven, known as Rhythm Tengoku in Japan and as Rhythm Paradise in the UK, is a series that has been around for 20 years at this point. Its quirky characters, numerous minigames and overall level of challenge have kept a community trying all sorts of things, from playing blindfolded to trying to pass its remixes and various levels at speeds the game was never intended to reach.
Now with over 10 years having passed since the last entry, 2015’s Rhythm Heaven Megamix, in 2026 Nintendo finally released a long awaited new instalment, Rhythm Heaven Groove. The gaming landscape has dramatically changed to include accessibility in that intervening time and, thankfully the company appears to have tried to meet that challenge (at least with this singular title) for gamers without sight, as evidenced by a demo that I showed off in a YouTube video that became my most viewed of all time.
The real question is, just how does the final release stack up in terms of its accessibility and are there any barriers to playing this without any assistance or workarounds?
First Boot
During first boot, you’ll notice something unexpected from a Nintendo title: a voice will start speaking to you, unprompted, telling you about potential issues when using wireless headphones. This is a positive sign of things to come, given this narration continues into the rest of the game and is enabled by default.
If you are playing on the same system and have played the demo of this title in advance, the game will recognise that you have save data from said demo on your console. You’ll know this when the console starts letting you know that you indeed have this data present (irrespective of if you’re on Switch 1 or 2) and be told how to interact with the UI as well to select what you want to do with said data, both in terms of carrying on from where you left off or starting fresh.
The character voicing this information does indeed have a name, going by Lil Miss Reeds. Unfortunately, to my knowledge she isn’t overtly introduced, as she was in a trailer from Nintendo themselves, only through some text that I happened to find later on. This is a shame, as I feel they should keep the introduction we see in the trailer intact, to fully immerse those who haven’t played the game before in the universe through this brilliant character. The fact that narration is provided through a character at all (outside of Mortal kombat 11’s announcer providing some menu narration) is a rarity in the accessibility landscape as well and I feel this is the most Nintendo way that it could’ve been handled (for lack of a better term), with the greatest respect to what’s been done here.
Once we select either yes or no in terms of if we want to progress with or without our save data from the demo, we are either brought to the title screen or asked to configure our read aloud settings (essentially how much you want Lil Miss Reeds to narrate).
“Reeding Level”
Lil Miss Reeds will narrate at 3 levels via the read aloud settings, those being off, read the words or read and describe. Read the words seems to cover tutorials and most menus, whilst the describe element adds in audio description-style pop ups that indicate what is happening on screen in what I would affectionately term as “light detail”. We’ll come on to that aspect a little later, but you can always change the level later if you need or want to.
Thankfully, each menu having its own music means that in theory, if you were to turn her narration off by accident, you could always find your way back to Lil Miss Reeds relatively easily, though I would not condone trying this even for testing just in case.
The Game Itself
Once you’re in the main menu (which doesn’t wrap, much like most screens in this game), you are given a series of various options to choose from. If you go into any of these and items within don’t speak, it is almost certainly because they are not unlocked yet. Having these read as “locked” or similar, much like elements in the main stage and game selection screen read as “it’s a secret” would really help with comprehension of what’s going on, rather than making it seem like the narration isn’t fully featured.
The Games
The Rhythm Heaven series is known for its wildly different, unusual and strange minigames that have you doing everything from playing Badminton whilst apparently standing on separate airplanes, to constructing robots or attempting to skewer food on a fork (just for a few examples), all in time with the rhythm and the various audio cues that are present. This title, of course, is no exception and all the games, as is tradition, have tutorials to show you just how things work in practice. Additionally though, this entry in the series includes something I’d always hoped to see, that being that if you hold Y on whatever controller you’re using, you’ll be able to hear, see and feel the game’s tutorial task being completed perfectly so you can see how you’re meant to progress in terms of timing and inputs.
This is a brilliant addition and has been really helpful for certain games in my experience, but it would be even better to see it be universal (i.e. available outside of the minigames in other modes) as well as be able to be optionally mapped to a toggle rather than a hold to better allow those who might have issues holding down a button to utilise this instructional feature.
If I were to go into specifics for each minigame, this review would be a novel, but suffice it to say all the minigames I’ve played so far have been fully accessible, even down to Lil Miss Reeds narrating numbers that appear on screen for sighted players required to hit particular cues in a latter stage, something I wasn’t sure how the title would handle in practice.
Beat Spell
Rhythm Heaven as a franchise is also no stranger to additional modes, be that endless games, drum lessons or a rhythm toybox amongst others. Some of these do return in Groove, but what you might not expect is an almost entirely self-contained roleplaying game (RPG) mode, Beatspell.
This mode has progression tied to the solo games, in that you can’t play later chapters without unlocking medals as well as clearing previous ones, but it has its own tutorials and systems which I won’t spoil. As a fan of the Rhythm Quest demo that released on Steam a good while ago, this put me partly in mind of that experience. However, this has a lot more complexity to it both in terms of rhythms and the patterns you have to remember for spells.
Speaking of patterns, an important note to remember is that any presses of a button other than A will not have a bell cue attached when you’re listening to said tutorials. Also, something the game doesn’t really tell you (if at all) is that you can also press down as a substitute for B where patterns call for it, to better help you hit tricky or more intricate patterns that might appear later in the story.
I will say that even as a musician and someone who enjoys rhythm games, sometimes the amount I had to remember did feel rather overwhelming, particularly in the latter stages. Being able to, as I discovered later, press X on the game’s map screens allowed me to view the patterns for the spells, which came in massively handy later on as the difficulty ramped up.
For those wanting something longer form and more intricate than the shorter minigames of the standard solo columns, I would highly recommend playing through this mode, albeit you’ll have to do so in handheld mode for the best experience.
Audio Description
An aspect of Lil Miss Reeds narration that I mentioned that becomes particularly relevant during Beatspell, but of course during other games as well, is the audio description that she provides. Whereas games like Bits And Bops give you relatively detailed descriptions of scenes such as the openings to their tutorials, Rhythm Heaven Groove instead mostly offers elements like “there is a monster in front of you”, rather than describing the colours, design or anything else for the non-boss enemies at least.
Admittedly this is a first for a Nintendo game in general, so I’m pleased that the description is there at all, though it would’ve been brilliant to see a greater level of detail. After all, saying “a stubborn monster” doesn’t really give you any information beyond an emotion which can also be interpreted multiple ways anyway. Having concrete details to work from such as whether armour has spikes, how many limbs monsters have (if relevant) or other considerations that sighted players will pick up on is important for informational parity and immersion.
Hopefully this along with other issues can be patched later down the line, as it would greatly enhance the experience and feeling of polish for the game overall.
latency, Lag and Everything In Between
The ultimate enemy of any rhythm game isn’t a player with a bad sense of timing, it’s not being able to hit the notes even if you feel like you’re on beat. This latency, lag, whatever you prefer to call it, is also present in Rhythm Heaven Groove in a variety of situations, as I found out the hard way when streaming the game on launch day.
Whilst most of the time when you play games, you don’t have to be super precise timing-wise, rhythm games, understandably, are a whole other ball game. I was using a pro controller from my original switch which I thought would be more comfortable and, whilst I was right in terms of how it felt in-hand, it seemed as though my ability to hit notes was hampered by when the game was expecting me to press whatever inputs were required being fairly significantly more precise than I’d anticipated.
I did run some additional tests and, from what I could figure out, the Joy-con 2’s that come with the Switch 2 console by default seemed to be the best option, but it was a shame I had to sacrifice comfort for playability. Having remembered the slightly demeaning warning I’d received from Beatspell about my setup, I resolved to try handheld mode.
Handheld Mode
Beatspell, that aforementioned RPG mode, did tell me that the TV I was using apparently would introduce significant problems but I could still attempt to play with the current setup or try using a different TV.
I decided to try the game in handheld mode to see what kind of night and day difference would be present, if any. To my shock, it was so noticeable that, instead of recording Beatspell footage for dissemination via YouTube videos (as I’d hoped to do originally), I felt it so much easier to complete that mode in the handheld format and merely write about it in brief as above, much to my annoyance.
The problem with handheld mode is that you can’t of course stream a game like that and still get the audio out of your console, not at least without rigging up a camera to see your device’s screen and a separate line-in style connection to run the sound from the game to your recording, at least that was the way I saw it. How other creators were achieving viable results for recording was and still is a mystery to me, but any clarification in the comments is much welcome.
More to the point, even in docked mode, you are unable to get the headphone audio out of your switch and still have the audio and video signal sent through HDMI simultaneously.
This means that in practice you have to either work around the lag (whether through software or hardware-based methods) or just play the game in handheld mode, neither of which are idea for content creators like me.
An Important Update
After some research thanks to assistance from my extremely helpful community, I purchased an Elgato 4KX capture card and the Chat Link Pro cable, as this was recommended to work with Switch 2 for streaming and recording. This external device was relatively straightforward to set up without assistance, though figuring out which were the HDMI in and out ports on the card was tricky as they had no tactile markings for differentiation. Similarly, understanding which of the two cables plugged into my capture card and my Switch 2 was difficult as the quick start guides only show pictures without giving any physical descriptions. I did see a piece of information saying about a “shorter cable” which did help, but it would be great if this kind of physical description was standardised in instructions as well for those that can’t see the images.
Once I had everything up and running with the hardware side as best I could, I downloaded Elgato Studio so that I could change a setting for the card itself, that being converting it into analogue audio mode. This would mean that I’d be able to get audio from the Switch into the card’s signal chain and have it output to the stream like any other capture solution, at least in theory.
Fortunately, it turned out, whether through intention or by design, this piece of Elgato software was relatively accessible with a screen reader, even if some of the labelling was a little confusing. As soon as I changed a combo box to say analogue audio instead of HDMI, the Rhythm Heaven Groove audio I already had playing blasted from my speakers and I was up and running in OBS with a couple of final tweaks.
This setup, as far as I’ve tested having only had it a couple of days as of the time of writing, seems to remove all barriers with latency-related issues, including the message that Beatspell brought up during my original attempts to stream it. I even got a perfect on one of the latter games when trying to create some test recordings, which just lent credence to the fact that I’d made seemingly the right, if an expensive investment.
I am currently not able to comment on whether lower-tier cards like the Neo or the 4kS will work for setups like this, but if I am ever able to test this for myself I could always update this review to confirm. I would suggest doing your own research but just know that sometimes, sadly, it’s the hardware that is in fact the bottleneck.
Switch 2 Accessibility
I was very lucky, prior to receiving my copy of the game (which I pre-ordered physically if anyone’s curious) to be able to get hold of a Switch 2 console to run it on. Though I won’t dwell on the accessibility positives and issues surrounding this iteration of Nintendo hardware, what I will say is that the screen reader, once you can get it up and running (usually with sighted help to get to the transfer screen) makes for a drastic upgrade compared to using OCR with a capture card.
During my launch day stream, I elected to remove my main game save data to see what the difference was between starting with a demo save and not doing so and was really pleased that I could just find the data and delete it thanks to the TTS implementation on the system itself. This would’ve been, as someone who hardly uses their Switch 1 at all, a daunting process on that older model, frought with potential danger so being able to do this myself, live on stream, was most certainly freeing.
If you have the choice of playing on Switch 1 or 2, I would highly recommend the latter, though I understand equally that option isn’t open to everyone.
Multiplayer
As a part of this ridiculously packed stack of minigames, you have the option of playing a further different plethora of games with friends. Of course you’d need extra controllers and the like, but that notwithstanding, the only thing missing is an online component. After all, these are local only as far as I’ve seen.
One cool thing to mention is that the narration will directly name the player whose turn it is, due to the fact the game is using a dynamic text to speech implementation, something you wouldn’t be able to do with pre-recorded files. It’s great to see Nintendo doing this when other games over the years from various teams have not used dynamic narration.
Whilst the multiplayer content is accessible without sighted assistance (excluding the colour menu which doesn’t read as was the case in the demo), I haven’t been able to try that experience out yet with other human players. If I do I will update this review, but I can’t foresee any issues arising from what limited testing I did conduct.
Suffice it to say that the multi-player games in this collection are just as strange and interesting as those you’d find in the solo area of the main package and I’d recommend you give them a look at least, even if you have to do so on your own with individual joy-con 2’s in horizontal grip.
Summary
Pros
- Fully accessible without sight including the first-time setup, a first for a Nintendo title
- Menu narration and audio description are included, both provided by an in-universe character in a choice that works well for the series
- Both single and multi-player games are accessible without the need for assistance.
- Narration is enabled by default and boots up without needing additional user interaction
- Audio description is included and works well
- Examples are available during tutorials for minigames and this system is referenced early on
Cons
- Lil Miss Reeds does not introduce herself, leaving gamers without sight unaware of her name initially
- Colour menu in multi-player doesn’t read.
- Audio description does not provide enough detail, especially as it could also describe some of the visual distractions and finishing images to name just some areas for improvement
- Items do not read as locked, just staying silent instead, making it confusing at first until you realise what’s intended
- Beatspell’s charts for spells are unclear without additional understanding, with no tutorial option to view how they should be executed with an actual example beyond the chart itself
Conclusions
Rhythm Heaven Groove is, without a shadow of a doubt, Nintendo’s most accessible title released to date for gamers without sight. There’s no need for workarounds like Optical Character Recognition (OCR), sighted help or memorisation of menus, which previously might have turned potential players away from a fun, quirky and intriguing entry in the series. As a massive fan of Bits And Bops and Rhythm Doctor, two fantastic accessible indie rhythm games released at the end of last year, Nintendo have, out of relatively nowhere, come along and created a third fully playable experience in the genre that has not just got gamers across the spectrum of sight loss buzzing, but everyone else in the community as well.
Though there are certainly a few small issues that could be resolved with patches should Nintendo be able to commit the resources to doing so, this could very much be the accessible game of the year contender, something I personally never thought I’d be able to say about a Nintendo title.
If you have a Switch or Switch 2 set up and want a game to play, or even if you are on the fence about the game, I would highly encourage you to give this game a try through its demo and see if it’s what you’re looking for in terms of a pick up and play title.
Above all, I want to thank Nintendo for delivering a fully accessible experience to an underserved market, finally fulfilling a dream that I and others have had for years. I hope this journey continues and that we see a greater degree of accessibility in other first-party releases for gamers without sight in the near and longer-term future.