The game has 5 difficulties: Past, Present, Future, Eternal,[6] and Beyond[7] (shortened to PST, PRS, FTR, ETR, and BYD).
[5] Arcaea began as a single-developer project by Anton Prydatko, inspired by Japanese arcade rhythm games.
[10] Eric Ford of TouchArcade says that it has "an awesome art style combined with very up-beat songs and a nice twist to the traditional rhythm formula".
[5] Dani Maddox of Siliconera said the game's music was "just amazing", with a large range of songs and genres.
However, she found the game's story mode to be poor, and encountered issues with controls in the Nintendo Switch version, such as the console's size when playing in touchscreen mode and the game being "finicky" with a controller.