I was flabbergasted as to how much of a failure this rhythm/puzzle adventure actually is. Being something of a confused lovechild between Professor Layton and Dance Dance Revolution, Rhythm Thief have you playing as art thief Phantom R, unraveling a scheme by a revived Napoleon Bonaparte (?!) to conquer the world with a secret weapon.

The setting of Paris, along with cute animated sequences and a jazzy soundtrack, is appealing in theory but destroyed by a carelessly constructed world. Navigating the city is done by moving around between set destinations on a map, and progress either requires you to talk with citizens and using a sound recorder to catch up sounds you can play up to force behaviours from people in your way (such as scaring away a cop by recording a bulldog). The potential of creating meaningful exploration and puzzle solving of these gameplay interactions is however completely lost due to the game always showing you exactly where you need to go - all the time. This makes this whole part of the game a tedious corridor with no interesting game design whatsoever.

The remaining parts of the game consists of puzzles and - of course - rhythm sequences. The puzzles feels rushed and almost broken in nature, since none of them require any analytical skill and is more about pressing a random button explicitly instructed by a text prompt. The rhythm sequences are ironically often out of the beat, wonky and unintuitive, with extremely few feeling even remotely fair or enjoyable as a player.

With more development time, play testing and some sort of more concise grasp of what the experience should consist of, this could have been a fun Layton-rip off. But that's just speculations, what we got in the end is an ultimately unfinished mess.