Cytus

Plot

The name Cytus is taken from Cocytus, the Greek mythological river of wailing or lamentation. Cytus features a story plot that is carried through its 10 main chapters as well as a prologue. The story revolves around the protagonist, Vanessa, who lives in a 22nd-century world where robots with human memories are the only remaining sentient beings while living humans are killed by a mutant virus. Due to limited memory space, human emotions are stored in the form of music in "Cytus", and by playing the songs, the robots are able to revive their human emotions. The plot features the disaster and the protagonist's struggle with identity. The story is told in-game through various cut-scenes that are unique to the chapter title songs; in comparison, the other individual songs within each chapter are at most only marginally relevant to the plot, except for a limited few.

Gameplay

The main gameplay of Cytus features the Active Scan Line, a black line that move up and down across the screen. The player taps circular objects, referred to as Notes, as the Active Scan Line passes over them, following the music.

Three types of Notes are used. The Click Note, a single circular note, requires tapping the object in time. The Drag Note, a continuous track of notes, requires dragging along the track. The Hold Note, a note with an extended ribbon meter, requires holding over the note until the meter is filled. Notes to be hit as the line rises are colored blue and purple, while those as the line drops are colored yellow and green.

Each Note is judged by the accuracy to be either Perfect, Good, Bad or Miss. The better the accuracy, the higher score is given. The maximum score is 1,000,000, and a minimum of 700,000 is required to clear a stage. After a stage ends, various metrics are provided to show the player's performance, including score, TP, a letter grade, and numbers of hits in each type of judgement.

Playable songs

Cytus includes more than 100 songs available for play in the game, spanning a variety of genres including pop music, trance music and drum and bass. The music is composed and performed by independent composers and artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. Vocaloid engines are also used. A number of songs also has alternate version(s) in addition to the normal version. These can be called upon by interacting with the song artwork in the song selection screen. Gestures used includes tapping, swiping and holding at a specific timing and location.

Cytus also includes a series of songs in image of the overarching plot, collectively named Cytus: Alive, added in version 6.0 in July 2014. Unlike normal songs, Cytus: Alive songs contains added plot animation during gameplay.

Releases and pricing

Cytus is available through the Apple App Store and Google Play. The full game charges a base price plus optional in-app purchases for players to purchase additional chapters of playable songs.

The release on Google Play is free but features a cooldown timer before starting each song. The cooldown will be removed when the full price is paid.

The PlayStation Vita and PlayStation Mobile port Cytus: Lambda includes the then-exclusive chapter Prologue: Live, otherwise identical to its smartphone releases. A teaser video was released onto YouTube prior to release on June 7, 2013.

Million Downloads Plan

Rayark Games announced the Million Downloads Plan (Chinese: 百首新歌，百萬下載; literally: "hundred new songs, million downloads") in the wake of "illegal piracy harming the sales figures of Cytus". Starting from Version 2.0.0, a 10-song chapter will be made available to all players for free for each 100,000 paid downloads achieved, up to a million paid downloads or ten chapters. The plan is completed with Version 8.0, released in July 2015, opening ten chapters for free, including the special Chapter Million featuring remixes of past songs.

Soundtrack

Multiple Cytus soundtracks have been released both on iTunes and as physical CD, featuring playable music and background composition from the game. Cytus -Prologue-, was released on April 1, 2012, Cytus -Hindsight- on December 10, 2013 and Cytus -Foresight- on December 28, 2013. A story album called Cytus -Alive- has also been released on August 20, 2012; the album features songs composed by Sta and Cranky with the same names as the ten chapters of the game. Each song corresponds to each chapter in the story plot.

Code: Cytus

Code: Cytus (Chinese: 柯基托斯) is a multimedia video game music stage production based on the story of Cytus, produced by Divertimento Media (Chinese: 樂乎乎工作坊) as commissioned by Quanta Arts Foundation (Chinese: 廣藝基金會). The production ran four shows in November 2014 in Taiwan.