vysetron

weird games only

play is sacred


I played the first few bosses of Bananner Nababber today. Lovely experience, would recommend others do the same (it's free!). This led to some thoughts on the Boss Rush.

We've kind of broadened the definition of Boss Rush, haven't we? The earliest version of it I can remember was usually a post-game unlockable that let you fight a game's bosses in sequence, omitting everything in between. Now we have loads of games that are just "one long boss rush", focused on making big interesting fights that functionally are the levels. The idea, ideally, is that this would be a game of nothing but the "best parts" of other games.

That quite doesn't work though, does it? Don't get me wrong I enjoy a boss rush game, and it's been interesting to see it come to tabletop in the form of games like Vagrantsong or Kingdom Death (both of which I have huge problems with but that's not the point right now). The problem with having your game be nothing but the "best part" on loop is that no game can pull that off. You're going to have ups and downs, favorites and leasts, great fights and awful hair pulling fun ruiners. Boss Rush, as a subgenre, is like trading in your bag of snack mix for the bag of nothing but the rye chips. Yeah it's great at first, but eventually you hit some that are less good and your teeth hurt.


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in reply to @vysetron's post:

One of the things I've always disliked about boss rush games is that they rarely encourage screwing around to learn stuff. I like having levels where there's space to learn your character's physics and limitations, or to mess around and discover counter-intuitive approaches. In the heat of constant pattern-heavy boss battles, this isn't where your brain goes.

Side note: Shadow of the Colossus does the whole "learn via level" approach masterfully, with all the ground you have to cover between fights.

Yeah, the "find the optimal solution" track is kind of fun in a puzzle solving way but puzzles with set solutions don't tend to have much staying power

One nice thing about Bananner Nababber is how each boss essentially has two goals: beat it, and also find each level's secret golden nosehair (I'd explain but the game doesn't). You have to platform and search for secrets without dying but don't have to win the fight to keep it. It's still just a second, different puzzle as opposed to a more open ended level, but it's still a pretty neat way to recontextualize the same stage/fight

SotC having the bosses actually -be- levels is still one of the best executions of the concept I've seen, really great stuff. Not sure another one has done it as well since