Is ‘Furi’ Too Difficult?
Aesthetically speaking, Furi is one of the most interesting creative works that I’ve engaged with in a long while. From a pulsing synthwave soundtrack to boss designs that are bursting with personality, Furi always struck me as a game that I would enjoy – despite its reputation of being hard-as-nails. It’s no secret that an art style or aesthetic presentation is enough to hook me in, which is how I found myself stubbornly persisting through the trials of King Dice in Cuphead or the Peak of the Mountain in Celeste. But after about five or six hours beating my head against the brick wall of Furi’s late-game bosses, I convinced myself to give up, step away, and uninstall the game. Furi, at least to me, is too difficult to continue.
One of the most successful articles I’ve ever published for Epilogue involves a painstaking description of why I quit playing Hollow Knight. It was a decision, as I detail in the piece, that I arrived at with much internal conflict, for I loved and respected many elements – especially aesthetically – that Hollow Knight had to offer. But in an almost identically similar way, as with the distant benches in Hollow Knight, I got jammed up at a boss that I simply couldn’t overcome: The Edge.
The Edge
The Edge is the ninth guardian – or eighth boss enemy – in Furi, who you fight as the Stranger. The Edge, like all bosses in the game, comes at you in various stages. For the Edge, specifically, his first few phases involve some unforgivingly precise reaction times. Furi features a parry system that is indicated by a high-pitched sound and a brief flash of the weapon before an enemy swiftly charges in to strike. Leading up to my fight with the Edge, I felt like I had become rather adept at my parry timing – my tangled encounters with the Song had trained me into submission – but I might as well have just been learning the mechanic. In my fight with the Edge, it took me a solid half hour to even advance out of the opening phase, for the Edge cycles through a number of odd parry timings that repeatedly destroyed me.
For context, I first began fighting the Edge after about ten hours of playing Furi. By the time I quit the game, I had amassed about sixteen hours, the final hours of which were all dedicated to this single boss fight. Within a few hours, I found myself weaving in and out of the first few boss phases of the Edge fight, making it rather consistently to his final phase. Along the way to this final phase, I had learned the uneven patterns of the Edge’s parry timings, and I was able to easily recover my health bars with each successive phase victory. You’d think that making it to the final phase of the Edge fight with full health would be a decisive advantage, but these extra health bars barely staved off my imminent demise each time. I have since gotten the Edge within millimeters of defeat, but something always goes wrong.
The final phase of the Edge fight doesn’t, unlike many other bosses throughout Furi, fundamentally change the gameplay mechanics or objective. The Edge just throws a relentless and powerful barrage of attacks that, when combined, always manage to take me off guard. Once I make my first mistake, I notice other mistakes compounding. Suddenly, the time-worn strategy of dashing back and forth during the wave attack of the final phase doesn’t seem as effective. Thus, I find myself at the Game Over screen, rubbing my eyes and sighing before I reluctantly dive back in once again.
After many hours of failing to surmount this final phase of the Edge fight, and many more iterations of his insufferably taunting voice lines, I was at my limit. I could only take so many deliveries of “Come on, give me something memorable. Something I can learn from, that will make me better.” Or, “Excellence is not an art, it’s pure habit. We are what we repeatedly do.” These lines feel like they are spoken to the player more than the character, and maybe I could have muted the game (at the expense of the incredibly good soundtrack), but the Edge got in my head, under my skin.
Roadblocks of Difficulty
I knew going into Furi that I’d run into roadblocks of difficulty – that was no surprise. And part of me loves the art style and music so much that I will probably reinstall the game at some point in the future. But here’s where Furi ran aground for my interest and patience level at the time of first playing it.
One of Furi’s most effective artistic decisions is simultaneously it’s most frustrating: the explicitly linear game design of boss rushes. Obviously, I have played and loved boss rush games like Cuphead or Shadow of the Colossus, but I never felt hopeless like I did with Furi. With Furi, as soon as you beat a boss, you are treated to a brief walking segment where the Voice serves as a narrator-character to connect the dots of the narrative. As the Stranger, you are attempting to break free of a multidimensional prison of sorts, locked away behind these proverbial prison wardens (bosses). As much as I loved these brief story moments, they always came with a hint of dread: maybe the next boss is where I’d get stuck. Eventually, I did.
I don’t think Furi is doing something fundamentally wrong with its boss rush design, but it made my brick-wall encounter with the Edge entirely defeating. I no longer felt like I was learning or getting better at the game, I was just clinging onto a cliffside with two tired fingertips. As I held on for dear life each fight, I felt increasingly exhausted with the game. At first, the game is frenetic and exciting, matching the pulsations of the music. Over time, I felt myself annoyed at the fact that I had to replay all three stages of a fight simply to make an additional attempt at the phase I was struggling with.
Hitting the Reset Button
These multiple boss phases caused me to think about one of the arguments I presented in my Hollow Knight piece a few years ago, which is the idea that difficulty, when well-implemented into game design, should allow you to instantly retry the aspect of the game giving you a challenge. Whereas games like Celeste — which is tough as nails but always fair – present a similar degree of difficulty to Furi, Furi commits the (arguable) sin of sitting the player on the naughty step between attempts. Taking the Edge fight as my example, I eventually improved my parry reflexes to skate through the first three phases, usually only taking an incidental hit or two along the way. Thus, as I kept working through all three initial phases leading up to the phase in which I was actually struggling, I became resentful of the mindless repetition involved. It would be better, I think, to allow for a restart at any specific phase.
If Furi allowed me to hit the reset button, not at the beginning of the fight, but at whatever phase I wanted to, I would have finished the game without a doubt. Again, the music and visual presentation are too groovy to ignore completely. But pretty soon in my playthrough of Furi, the pseudo-challenge of aping my way through the motions of phases I had already mastered was completely dejecting. I just wanted to get back to that fourth phase so I could experiment with the Edge’s newly transformed attack patterns, violently alternating between walls of flames along the ground and an oar-like weapon that he mercilessly slammed against my helpless parries.
Why I Gave Up on Furi
Thinking on my fruitless battles against the Edge returns me to the question at the top of this piece: is Furi too difficult? The intellectual answer I want to give is “no,” Furi was simply too difficult and therefore tedious for me. There are far too many other games in my library for me to spend hours on a single, frustrating boss encounter. And so I hit “uninstall” with a degree of resignation and reluctance. But the emotional answer I feel compelled to give is “yes,” Furi itself is too difficult. Yes, the game has gradual difficulties. Yes, you can put the controller down and return to it later. Yes, people obliterate these bosses unthinkingly in speedruns under half an hour. It’s all there, it’s all possible, but it wasn’t forgiving enough for a player like me to keep going. Maybe that’s the developers’ intentions, but I doubt it. They put so much love into this game that I feel like I’m shortchanging the experience by not seeing it through to the end.
In my time with Furi, I overcame some truly arduous encounters. When I first made it through the Burst’s seemingly never-ending phases, it was a remarkable moment of elative victory. When I finally mastered all the bizarre formations of the final bullet hell patterns in my fight with the Song, it felt like I had eked out the luckiest victory possible. There were many similar moments throughout my first dozen or so hours with Furi, all of which I think back on with positive impressions.
The Spectre of Unconquered Games
I remember when I first saw Furi played, a time where I was crashing on my friend’s couch during a GDQ event one week. On one monitor, we had the charity marathon pulled up, listening and watching along to our favorite runs. On another, my friend was playing Furi. And he, too, was stuck on the Edge fight. As I drifted off to sleep for a nap on his couch, I remember hearing the same mocking words from the Edge: “It seems like we’re fighting each other. But we both know that we’re fighting against ourselves.” Even worse, “Do I look unconquerable to you?” As I heard those lines repeated over and over, I started to dislike the game. Holy crap, I remember thinking, how are you still going against this same boss? Now I know all too well.
Furi is the first game since Hollow Knight where I have felt guilty for quitting early on the story and the gameplay. Even though I’ve seen enough speedruns of both games to speak intelligently about either of them and their respective endings, there is that nagging part in the back of my mind that knows there are still unconquered aspects left in both games. Like Hollow Knight before it, I feel certain that a break from the game is necessary. Similarly, I worry that taking such an extended break will completely erase my muscle memory that the game mechanics have taught me. In either case, I think these games would be improved by a slightly more forgiving checkpointing system, something that allows the player to spend as little time as possible repeating already-completed aspects of the game just to test their mettle against a later challenge.
I didn’t uninstall Furi with an explicitly negative opinion about it, but I will be trepidatious if I install the game again. Now I know what I’m up against. And it’s not going to be any easier with a break. Furi is one of the most difficult games I have played, for better and for worse. But I greatly respect the artistic craftsmanship, even if it completely intimidates me going forward.
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