Friday Night Funkin’

Friday Night Funkin’ is an open-source rhythm game programmed by Ninjamuffin99, includes artwork by Phantom Arcade and evilsk8r, with music composed by Kawai Sprite. This game is playable in your web browser and so can be played on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Aesthetically the game is similar to Flash games popular in the early 2000s. Gameplay is similar to other rhythm games such as Dance Dance Revolution and PaRappa the Rapper. The game doesn’t really have a very complicated story. It’s mostly about a boy trying to impress a girl with his singing ability in competition with other singers.

Gameplay and controls are pretty basic, so it should be simple for most gamers to get the hang of it fairly quickly. There is a tutorial section that explains the controls and how to play the game, but it’s not really too necessary because the first challenge is really easy to beat. Players will be using the up, down, left, and right keys on their keyboard in time with the keys displayed on the screen.

Your opponent will go first to give you a preview of the upcoming keys you will need to press. Sometimes the opponent will complete the section before you will need to start hitting keys, but sometimes you will need to start pressing keys before they are done with that section. It appears to depend on how long each section is and a little bit to do with the style, speed, and difficulty of the song. Players will need to either tap a key or hold it down. If you need to hold down the key the game indicates that by having a trailing bar that shows how long you will need to hold down that key.

There are a total of 18 songs (not including the tutorial), each being more challenging than the previous one. In story mode, you must beat each song challenge in order to move on to the next one, or you can play in freeplay mode you can select any song you wish and play that. If you want to beat the game in story mode, you can try playing some of these songs in the freeplay to practice and get an idea of what to expect.

There are three levels of difficulty, easy, normal, and hard. If your hand-eye coordination and reaction time isn’t so good, consider starting with easy difficulty and then slowly working your way up to the normal difficulty, because even on normal difficulty the second song is already fairly challenging. At the bottom of the screen is an indicator of how well you’re doing. If you’re winning the bar will fill up green and if you’re losing the bar will start to fill up red. If you hit the wrong key too many times you will lose the match and need to retry. When you lose you’ll be greeted by a cute cartoon image of the hero’s skeleton (his brain and balls are visible, so maybe young kids shouldn’t play this game).

Starting on April 18th, 2021 the developers launched a Kickstarter to raise funds to be able to have the resources to develop the game from a demo into a full game, and within just a couple of hours they had already reached their fundraising goal of $60K and reached a remarkable $2 million not long after. Because the game is open-source, it can be very easily modded and therefore has attracted a very large modding community.

You should try this game out, it’s pretty fun. Click this link to play Friday Night Funkin’.