Furi

The way the music and visuals flood your brain with intensity and a need to lock in on each boss fight, forcing you into the flow state and challenging you to master your dashes and parries, has never quite been replicated by any other game.

Learning and getting better step by step felt amazing. The game is very forgiving too with the heal after finishing a boss phase, which helped me not to quit because of how difficult it is (for me, as I'm not very skilled at playing games).

Solid action game, push it to the limit.

It's a fun boss rush game. It's mainly bullet hell. A word of advice: the dash goes off when you RELEASE the button, not when you press it. The longer you hold, the longer the dash will be.

fun, boss fights only the two tracks by The Toxic Avenger are the greatest takeaway from this game

parryslop with a genuinely awful final fight. let me tell you how much i've come to despise this dog ass game. every single fight is carefully calculated to be as boring and restrictive as possible. there is a fight that punishes you for perfect parrying. another that has you switch to full on bullet hell mode with no melee attacks allowed. there is an emphasis on superficial spectacle and looking cool. the desperation phases and other fight-lengthening mechanisms clearly only exist to have the bosses spout half-assed pseudo-intellectual nonsense at you. in-between boss fights you get to suffer through walking segments that contribute nothing to the overall experience. all of the writing style screams ESL mannerisms. truly one of the games of all time. at least the soundtrack is nice.

Furi wants you to know it's difficult before you've even finished reading the store page, and unlike some games that wear difficulty as a badge while actually being manageable, Furi means every word of it. The Game Bakers built something that is essentially a boss rush with no filler between the bosses, which sounds clean in theory and is genuinely brutal in practice. Every encounter is a extended duel that demands pattern recognition, precise timing, and the kind of patience that hard games tend to select for naturally. If that clicks for you it's apparently transcendent. If it doesn't you're going to spend a lot of time watching a cool looking character die repeatedly in a stylish environment while your blood pressure climbs. The art style is legitimately excellent, Afro Samurai character designer Takashi Okazaki did the visual direction and it shows. The soundtrack is similarly impressive, a who's who of electronic artists that would work as a standalone playlist. The presentation is doing everything right. But difficulty that doesn't flex at all eventually stops feeling like a challenge and starts feeling like the game asserting dominance for its own sake, and Furi sits right on that line for a lot of players. There's no shame in bouncing off it. Some games are designed for a specific kind of masochist and that's fine, it just means the rest of us get to admire the art direction from a safe distance and move on with our lives. Cool game. Not for everyone. Definitely not for anyone who values their controller's continued physical integrity.