Infuriating

Furi is a bastard of a game.

It isn't without merit: the fundamentals of combat are satisfyingly tight, the boss encounters are creatively designed, and the pulse-pounding soundtrack is great at building up each fight.

But the manner in which Furi strings those components together is outrageously punishing. It's "hard" in the way that classic arcade games are hard; borderline merciless, and utterly disrespectful of your time.

In a boss fight, both you and the enemy have a stack of health bars. When you damage the enemy enough to deplete a bar, the fight will move into a new phase. And as a reward for your progress, your current health bar will be refilled! Great ... except the inverse applies, too. If your health bar is depleted, the enemy's current bar will be refilled -- restarting the current phase.

In other words, if you're not "good enough" to finish a boss phase in a single life bar, the game will continue to torture you with that phase until you die.

And I would dispute that this game's measure of "good enough" is reflective of general skill: Furi's bosses aren't afraid to break out unprecedented attacks, which you couldn't possibly know how to avoid until you've been damaged by them at least once. A surprise heat-seeking bullet, or an unexpected chain of melee attacks, increases the likelihood of you having to start a phase over from scratch.

So, in the process of learning one phase of a boss fight, you'll probably die a few times. Now consider that in the default "Furi" difficulty, the first boss has seven phases. And you have three health bars. Like... do the math on that one.

Even on the easy-peasy "Promenade" difficulty, where you deal more damage and have more health bars while the enemy has fewer, the die-and-retry loop becomes un-fun fairly quickly.

And what is your reward for defeating each boss? It sure isn't the story, which is slowly teased with indecipherable hints, or the ponderously boring path that you're made to walk to the next boss. The only thing you have to look forward to is the next boss.

Furi is a game for people who want to fight bosses and do nothing else. And at a totally different scale from Shadow of the Colossus; Furi is more demanding of your agility, more exhausting in fight complexity, and more punishing in its retry-loop. Figuring out each encounter is largely a function of throwing your corpse at it over, and over, and over again.

Furi's good ideas are made intolerable by how much it clearly wants you to suffer instead of having fun.

Better than: most other Awful games; at least Furi shows signs of competence, and has a cool soundtrack.
Not as good as: Shadow of the Colossus (2018)
I watched the ending online: and it sure doesn't seem worth the effort. The story teasers remain obtusely teasy all the way until the very end, which is basically a shitty twist.

Progress: Beat the first boss on Furi difficulty, second and third bosses on Promenade difficulty.