Ninety-five concurrent players. Three reviews. One-third positive. MUSYNX:RETURN launched April 2 on Steam as the fifth-ranked new release, and those numbers tell you everything about how little momentum a rhythm game can carry when it arrives broken and creatively hollow.

Developer I-Inferno and publisher Wave Games promise a return to classic rhythm mechanics — four-lane, six-lane, and a new two-lane mode for beginners, plus 20 original songs at launch. The store page is upfront about one thing: “Some visual assets include AI-generated content.” What it’s less upfront about is that the game doesn’t work.

Players report that selecting any song triggers a crash. Not occasionally. Every time. One reviewer noted they encountered the same bug in the demo and assumed it would be fixed by release. It was not.

Then there’s the art question. The mode and difficulty selection screens use visibly AI-generated graphics. More troubling for rhythm game players — a community that treats illustrators and composers as collaborators, not interchangeable suppliers — the song illustrations carry no illustrator credit. The credit field exists in the UI. It’s been left blank. One reviewer reported that the developer responded to their concerns and confirmed the song art is AI-generated.

Rhythm games live and die on their creative partnerships. The genre’s most beloved titles — osu!, Cytus, DJMAX — are celebrations of artists as much as gameplay. Shipping a rhythm game with uncredited AI-generated song art isn’t just cutting corners. It’s a values statement. And at $16.99 on sale (regularly $19.99), players are being asked to fund it.

MUSYNX:RETURN sits at 33% positive on Steam. That number could improve as the sample size grows. But the game needs to actually run first.

Sources