In Furi, there are no exotic mechanics, insatiable combo chains, or compulsory battles against waves of time-eating sycophants. Instead, Furi trusts the player to process a tiny allowance of raw actions into a dazzling exhibition of refined skill. With a Murderer’s Row of bosses perfectly apt to oblige this exercise, Furi helps define a new aesthetic of rarefied action.
It starts with a brief instruction of available action. You have a lock-on strike with a sword, which can also be charged. You have a lightning-fast dash, which…can also be charged. And you have a gun with limitless ammo affixed to an analog stick, which, you guessed it, can be charged. There’s also a parry, which cannot be charged, but is great at absorbing health if properly timed. With these modest tools, Furi allows its player to conquer the world.
How exactly you’re allowed to do that requires a brief but important note of composition. The player starts with three lives while the opponent has anywhere between four and five. Running out of health costs the player a life, but it can be restored by taking one from a boss. A boss, on the other hand, can refill their existing energy if the player falls, but they can never get a life back. A caveat; each time a boss falls, he or she comes back with a modified and much more demanding set of attacks.
Furi’s suite of mechanics revels in the intimacy between construction and application. While opposition consists entirely of arena-based boss fights, each encounter is a multi-staged performance of pattern recognition and punishment. Almost like Nier’s multifaceted battles but from a top-down perspective, Furi dances a line between a dodge/parry/punish action game and a bona fide shoot ’em up. Bosses will shift between getting close with melee attacks and creating distance to deploy insane volleys of health-melting laser fire and obliterating light beams. There’s a bit of trial and error at play in Furi, but it rewards situational awareness and quick reflexes.
Call and response is paramount to kinetic action games. Furi understands this and doesn’t allow queuing of moves or unnecessary cinematics onscreen. You push a button, and, even if it cancels something else, it instantly happens. This is particularly crucial when you’re trying to parry an onslaught of melee attacks, a feat aided by a few audio and visual ques, but it can be the difference from getting wiped in ten seconds to surviving a battle that rages on for nearly thirty minutes.
Every boss in Furi is memorable. The Chain—boss names are essentially borrowed from Metal Gear Solid 3’s school of nomenclature—is your introduction, slowly dolling out easily parried hits and absorbing a hail of gunfire. The Strap, confined in a small maze and awfully quick, teaches the importance of spacing and position. Unconventional defense is preferred by The Hand and his reflective shield while The Line is a threatening cacophony of barriers and patience. Every single boss, and by extension each phase, has a precise craftsmanship tuned and refined so tight you’d think, but never suspect, the wheels might actually come off.
My favorite fight in Furi was a tumultuous exchange with a sniper, The Burst. Whereas all of Furi’s previous fights had been a de facto arena, this one was spread out over an enormous plane ripe with barriers, landmines, and laser-shooting enemies. In her first two phases she disappeared and fired one-hit-kill shots from afar, forcing me to take cover every time I saw her red laser. Her final two lives were a mixture of homing missiles, melee attacks, and rigorous mad dashing on my part to avoid it all. Her final phase issued one of the more severe instances of multidirectional situational awareness (see also: bullet hell) Furi has to offer, and I spent something like four or five hours dealing with it. Imagine my surprise when I finally beat that phase and discovered the fight wasn’t quite over yet.
The rate at which personal skill can progress is empowering. The Burst fight was an exception, I didn’t spend more than an hour on Furi’s other bosses, but in a moment of self-realization I was impressed with how easily I was taking down her formerly-tough opening phases. On nearly every boss I would get wrecked the first time out. Before long, patterns are internalized, visual cues are involuntary memorized, and your ability to dash, parry, and deliver punishment is constantly evolving. Lost in Furi’s simplification is an option for improvisation—there are only a handful of ways to handle a situation—but it does make room for lightning fast advanced play, and it’s usually rewarded with a quick cut of your opponent getting thrashed.
Furi only suffers when it’s bogged down by the weight of its engine. I don’t know what it is with Unity games and the PlayStation 4, but Furi exhibits performance issues that have dragged down other Unity-made games like Broforce and Firewatch. Occasionally, in the middle of combos, sound will drop completely. Cut-scenes are subject to frame tearing and a desperate need of a V-Sync option. The only fight that routinely suffers is the battle with The Burst, which tends to chug during the sniper sections (and I say this being completely ignorant of programming, but it seems related to the large amount of real estate in that particular fight). These issues only affected 1% of my time with Furi, but it’s disappointing in an action game that’s otherwise adherent to such meticulous standards.
Quiet interstitial sequences bookend each fight. These seem to serve three different purposes. The first is for The Stranger (that’s you) to listen to a man with a Donnie Darko-esque bunny rabbit head pontificate about the world and the opponents you’ll be facing. The second is to give you a quick breather because, damn, that last fight was probably hard. The third appears to be a simple indulgence; the environments that compose Furi are as varied as they are beautiful. During these sequences the camera is locked to a specific angle, and it always seems to showcase a gorgeous, vibrant vista. It isn’t particularly detailed, but I haven’t seen such a lush and inspired use of light and color since El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron.
A frenetic soundtrack is an ideal complement to the intensity of Furi’s combat. Synthwave extraordinaire Carpenter Brut (whose Trilogy compilation is exceptional fuel for your workout of choice) contributes three songs, with additional pieces by Waveshaper, The Toxic Adventure, Kn1ght, Lorn, and Danger. More melodic work outlines quieter moments between boss fights, but the remainder exists for the explicit purpose of hyping the player during a chaotic fight. I don’t think these are licensed tracks, they appear to be created specifically for Furi, providing a game with no shortage of memorable moments with another custom signature.
Furi didn’t get here by accident; one look at the Special Thanks section of its credits reveals a cogent stable of influence. You can’t think of rushing through pattern-based bosses without considering Genyo Takeda’s Punch-Out!!. It’s hard not to see an offense of blades and guns and not think of Hideki Kamiya’s Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. God Hand, and with it Shinji Mikami’s passion for relentless and brutal action, is part of every boss’ finale. The Game Breakers, while trying to create a game that would make their heroes proud, may have actually surpassed some of them in the process.
