Agents of Groove
Agents of Groove is the first game from Synaptic Sugar and it’s kind of like… PaRappa the Rapper and No One Lives Forever had a baby. Maybe a little Beatmania in there with some Austin Powers. It is a BIG undertaking for a first game, and it’s dripping in style in a way that most Playdate games (hey, maybe most games) cannot manage.
It’s a story-based rhythm game, so you’ll see silly cutscenes in between a variety of gameplay levels. Across the 15 total stages, there are four different kinds that you’ll come across: cranking to the beat while button matching, straight button matching with even more buttons, sneaking levels, and alternating dance battles à la PaRappa. When you get the crank rhythm down while also matching the prompts scrolling across the bottom of the screen, it can feel like you’re a pro drummer (or at least one from Rock Band). It takes a lot of coordination! As such, it can become very hard on even normal difficulty.
This is why I am SO THANKFUL for the variety of accessibility options that only make the game more playable. Even I, a rhythm game connoisseur, was only able to make it about halfway through the game on normal mode before having to add some adjustments, effectively dropping it down to easy difficulty. However, whether you’re looking to turn off the crank or accelerometer controls (I never once got the accelerometer movements down, like how it feels like only three people on Earth have ever beat the calibration level on Direct Drive), or enable “push any button” mode, or you need a looser timing window, or you want to get rid of all negative effects from missing a note, or maybe you even want to make it harder (you wild person!) by requiring a perfect note match for each prompt, there is something here that will help you complete the game. That said, I thought I did the sneaking level practically perfect on normal difficulty level and still wasn’t able to pass it, so these helpful options might be essential for you to see the story to the end.
The story itself is cute and has a fair amount of improbable twists, like any classic spy thriller. There are disco fiends, and your lady in the chair, and pirates, and robot detectives, and a whole lot of dance battles as you try to find who’s really behind the chaos. If you liked Archer or Frisky Dingo or anything along those lines, you’ll find something to love here.
The music, to me, was not quite as catchy, highly produced, or had as much variety as in Otto’s Galactic Groove or Direct Drive, but headphones are still a must, and all the tunes are groovy. My favorite was the underwater one, but I think that adding song names (to give them more of an individual identity), or lyrics, or something that really shows off the Playdate’s actually impressive sound capabilities would elevate this game higher and have you humming the tunes long after turning the game off.
Juggling the buttons you need to press along with keeping the cranking in rhythm, or switching between the A/B buttons and crank rotations, there’s a lot going on here – you’ll need all your focus to do well. This is not a “play in the backseat while your dad drives down a bumpy road” type of game. It keeps track of your scores so you can come back and try to do better later, and there will be online leaderboards when it makes its Catalog debut in January 2026 (this review is based on the Itch release that came out over a month earlier). It’ll be neat to see who blasts to the top immediately and stays there!
Agents of Groove is a charming story-based rhythm game with a strong sense of identity. It asks a lot of you, and that might be exactly what you’re looking for! For me, I’m glad there were so many accessibility options to adjust the difficulty to a level where I was able to see it to the end, because it’s worth completing this journey. Get groovin’!
(Released November 25, 2025, on Itch. Coming January 2026 to Catalog. Copy provided by developer.)