Furi

Furi is a fast-paced action game with elements of hack and slash, shoot ‘em up (twin stick and bullet hell) and consists entirely of boss fights. Gameplay focuses around dodging bullets, parrying attacks to regain health, attacking the bosses up close through melee or afar with ranged projectiles, and quick time events. The game is set in a series of linear closed world environments. The setting of the game is a prison composed of ten small arenas (floating islands) connected by shorter pathway segments.

Much of the game’s story progresses through mid fight interactions with bosses and short cutscenes at the beginning and end of the fights. The rest of the story is told during player controlled walking sections that act as longer cutscenes and provide downtime between boss fights.

A mysterious man known only as The Stranger spends his existence receiving endless torture within a highly advanced prison, composed of ten islands floating in orbit above a planet's surface. At the beginning of the game, an enigmatic man wearing a rabbit disguise who is known as The Voice frees The Stranger, gives him a sword and gun, and encourages him to fight for his freedom.

The Stranger must navigate each area, wherein dwells a single powerful guardian who exists only to prevent him from escaping: The Chain, a sadistic staff-wielding jailor who tortured the Stranger; The Strap, a prisoner armed with a laser cannon on her head driven mad from her imprisonment; The Line, a wise old man who wields a sword longer than his body and can manipulate time; The Scale, a vengeful diver armed with twin harpoons; The Hand, a noble knight who was responsible for imprisoning the Stranger in the first place; The Song, an angelic woman armed with twin crossbows who conceived the prison; The Burst, a sniper and master tactician; The Edge, an oar-wielding warrior who dedicated his life to fighting The Stranger; and The Beat, a young woman with sonic weapons who strives to guard the final door.

During the early stages of development creative director and co-founder of The Game Bakers Emeric Thoa decided that the team needed to “focus on making one precise thing and to make it well”. Thoa believed that if the studio were to attempt to try and appeal to a broader audience they would end up being drowned out by other games that were bigger or “more edgy”. The team decided to focus the game around boss fights and put all of their effort into making them as satisfying and challenging as they could. The team attempted to create unique and interesting bosses taking inspiration from other games such as Nintendo’s 1994 Super Punch Out!! and Capcom’s 2006 God Hand.

During development the team wanted to make the bosses feel equal to the player, according to Thoa the main tension of the game came from the idea that the player character is “extremely strong” and that they are facing an “extremely strong adversary”. The team also aimed to make the controls “easy to learn but hard to master”, to accomplish this the control scheme was simplified and things like combos were not included. Instead the team decided that the game would focus more around the players reflexes and learning the boss’ attack patterns. Due to this focus on player reflexes the developer’s target frame rate was sixty frames per second, this was to maintain the speed of the game and better reflect their design choices.

Furi received "generally favorable" reviews according to review aggregator platform Metacritic. James Davenport of PC Gamer gave it an 86 out of 100, claiming it "is only held back by rare bugs and poorly designed difficulty spikes." Jeff Marchiafava of Game Informer gave it a 6 out of 10, citing a lack of engagement in the environment and unforgiving difficulty, although user reviews on platforms such as Steam have been far more positive.