Nocturne, the rhythm-combat RPG from Pracy Studios, launched on Steam on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, and it has two family trees. The pixel-art story RPG sits on one side and the rhythm game on the other, and founder Benjamin Pracy spent ten years getting the two to share a table. It costs $19.99 with a 10 percent launch discount, on Windows only and in English only, and the studio says it runs on Steam Deck. Combat is rhythm-based rather than turn-based or action.
You wake as Karma, a thousand years dead, inside a digital afterlife built to hold what was left of humanity. Karma expected the promised utopia and a brother waiting in it. The world is rotting instead, the brother is missing, and the company on the road is a mischievous boy and a giant orange fish. That is the setup, and that is where I stop.
Every fight is a track. Notes come down the columns, hits on the beat land the damage, and too many misses let the enemy hit back. There are 101 tracks in the game, the boss themes were recorded live by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra, and the soundtrack leans symphonic rock. Six difficulty settings run from a per-column autoplay, which lets one hand play the whole game, up to an Arcade Mode that scores every song for trophies.
The two families Nocturne descends from
The rhythm side of the family is younger than it looks. Square Enix’s Theatrhythm Final Fantasy put a rhythm game over RPG music in 2012, and Crypt of the NecroDancer put a beat under a dungeon crawl in 2015. Everhood, from 2021, is the closest cousin: a story game with a strange cast where the fights are played to music. Nocturne’s other side is older, the top-down pixel RPG that runs from Chrono Trigger to Sea of Stars, and that is the side its 100,000-plus-word script answers to. Ten hours is short for that family and long for the other one.
Pracy has been open about the length of the road. A free first chapter, Nocturne: Prelude, went out in 2020 after a year of beta. A Kickstarter planned for that August was cancelled, and the studio’s blog said development would go on self-funded toward a summer 2023 finish. That became 2024, then a Chapter 1 demo in July 2024, then a 2026 date set last November. “Nocturne has been my focus for an entire decade,” Pracy said in the launch announcement, and the release counts more than 200,000 Steam wishlists gathered along the way.
Two family trees and one heir, and the reunion took a decade. Nocturne is on Steam now at $17.99 until the launch discount ends.
