What Project Heartbeat is
Project Heartbeat is a rhythm game built around Eurobeat and pop tracks, the kind of music made famous by the Initial D anime and manga. You hit the indicated buttons in time with the music to build up your score. The game ships with more than 25 hand-charted official songs from artists like SuganoMusic, TORAV4, Galaxian Recordings and Odyssey Eurobeat, with more than 15 songs still in development. It offers two different play styles, so you can pick whichever suits you. The game is in Early Access and makes no use of generative AI in its code or assets.
Playing together
Multiplayer is where the game gets chaotic. You can play against your friends directly in multiplayer mode, or chase the global leaderboards to see how you stack up against the wider community. Every song, including community-made ones, has its own leaderboard across all difficulties, so there is always a score to beat. The community is described as welcoming to new players and content creators, which helps when you are just starting out.
Making and sharing content
The Steam Workshop is fully supported, with more than 2000 community-made charts already available to play. The built-in editor lets you chart your own songs and share them with friends, and community-made songs get their own leaderboards. You can also share and play custom resource packs, change note graphics, reskin the entire UI, and use video files as backgrounds through full FFmpeg integration. If you have an existing PPD install, the PPD manager tool lets you import your charts.
Engine and technical notes
Project Heartbeat runs on Shinobu, a custom open source audio engine built specifically for rhythm games and refined over 5 years. It aims for low latency and responsive input, using a tickless system similar to the one popularized by Counter-Strike 2 to ensure sub-frame accuracy of your inputs. You can check in-depth stats and progression history on the website. Higher difficulty versions of songs are available if you want a steeper challenge.