Back in June I played the demo for One Btn Bosses, a game where your only weapon against a series of bosses is a single button that moves your character. The full game came out earlier this week, and I’ve been enjoying it, even if I’m repeatedly getting wrecked.
There’s a loose narrative laid over the game, a play on rising through the ranks of an office environment (“bosses,” you see), but it feels like it's there just to give some personality to the gameplay. You guide a little triangle along a track, in the middle of which sits some kind of boss enemy. You shoot automatically, so your one button is about dodging. At first, the button only makes you change directions; as you progress, you get the ability to dash through boss attacks, speed up in the opposite direction, and more.
The boss attacks include basic projectiles, rays, spinning pillars, homing missiles, size-changing shapes that do damage, shields that have to be taken out to progress a fight, and this one attack that clearly telegraphs its path that I nevertheless constantly screw up. Things can get pretty chaotic when more than one of these elements is on the screen; so far, my best tip is to ignore the colorful chaos and just focus on where your triangle is and what it's headed into, something that isn't easy when there is so much going on. Every few bosses you face off against some kind of megaboss, who has to be beaten a number of times in different arenas to progress. I’m on the third one right now, where one of the available fights didn’t give me too much trouble, but the rest are kicking my ass.
The game is tough in the way boss fight games are. Picking the right ability helps, but you need a combination of memorizing attack patterns, good timing and reflexes, and patience to make progress. I lack all of these things, but I’m still having a good time in the game, enjoying its simple art style, fast pace, and (hypothetically) short levels. If you lose a fight, a progress bar shows you how far you got, which is a nice feature both for helping me think I fared better than I did, and for convincing me to try just one more time.
There’s also a roguelike mode if you get too stuck on a boss, which you can switch to at any time in the game’s campaign. Overall, One Btn Bosses does a lot with its simple premise, mixing things up without throwing too much new stuff at you at once. I will probably never beat it, given how much I suck at boss fights, but I’m enjoying trying.
