March 21st 2022

Beaten 1st time on difficulty – Furi (Normal)
Mods/fixes used: None
Favorite OST –
02 – 6.24 (by Danger)
12 – You’re Mine (by Carpenter Brut)
15 – A monster (by Waveshaper)

“The jailer is the key. Kill them and you’ll be free.”

You are a prisoner. You are tortured everyday by a sadistic jailer. You can’t be killed and so the jailer keeps torturing you and eventually you pass out, you wake up and the process repeats. But one day a strange person in a oversized bunny hat wakes you up, frees you, gives you a sword and tells you to fight for your freedom. “The jailer is the key. Kill him and you’ll be free”. And the game starts. We slowly make our way towards an exit when the jailer comes back up and promises us that we’ll regret every step we’ve taken out of our cell. Our first fight begins and not even 5 minute passed since pressing “New game”.

Furi is all about killing jailers, each jailer has multiple phases and different mechanics that you need to learn to beat them. There are no minor enemies in-between, only nine jailers that you need to beat + one extra boss depending on what ending you pick in the end. You have a sword and a pistol, you can charge both weapons by holding their respective buttons for couple seconds to deal more damage. You can dodge projectiles or AoE attacks, some projectiles can be parried back at the enemy, and you have to parry melee attacks to not take damage, successful parry of a melee attack also heals you a little.

Furi is not completely unforgiving as you start with 3 lives before you have to try the boss again. The game calls them KO’s as technically your character can’t die but in game it functions as extra life. Say you reach 2nd phase of a boss, but they beat you. Boss stays in 2nd phase but they heal back to full, so you do but have one life less. If they beat you two more times, it’s back to phase one. However if you beat them, you get your life back (but it can’t go over 3). So yeah if boss has 7 phases for example, it’s possible to beat them even if you were knocked 7 times as long as you pushed them to next phase after getting beat once.

The game may seem very difficult at first, as first boss is pretty quick and the only warm-up you get are his special 3 phases at start that serve as a tutorial on how to attack, charge your attacks, parry etc. and then the hand holding is over. I got really frustrated at first as I couldn’t parry fast enough even in training and got beat three times at the first, non-training phase. But you get used to the pace the game throws at you, and near end you’ll know you can dodge or parry any attack the game throws at you. When I did a 2nd playthrough the first boss felt like a pushover. Same for 2nd boss which I thought was insanely hard at first. But if that doesn’t sound like your kind of game, don’t worry as there is a special difficulty that was added later, that’s meant for players who just want to know the story and see the end with no frustration or trying over and over. Looking at gameplays from that mode, it looks like some attacks are missing, bosses are slower and you have more time to react. And everything deals very little damage. If you’re that type of player that wants to experience a story and not spend time learning the game, it’s for you. As for story sure there is some, but the main focus of this game is combat. Sure, I had some questions, like who my character is, why this huge, complex prison was built just for him, who the bunny man is and why is he helping me escape. But it’s all about combat and you’re robbing yourself from true Furi experience by playing on story mode.

OST is absolutely fantastic and fits each boss. It was composed by different electro and synthwave music artists specifically for this game and music gives you that extra kick to keep trying. However I have two complaints about sound in this game, one – it’s too quiet. Normally, on headphones I have if I set my volume to 30-32% and usually it’s good, in this game I had to set it to like 46-50% in windows mixer, IDK why the entire game is so quiet, I had everything on max in options, in windows mixer the game wasn’t set lower than other apps either. Second – sometimes sound would randomly cut off for a second, usually it happened when walking from one arena to another when bunny man talks to you, but both of these are small complaints.

It’s also pretty clear that anime/manga was huge inspiration for this game’s combat design, your character runs like Naruto characters, uses a katana, game has some cool cutscenes that could be in anime, I think, sorry I only watched Naruto and JoJo so maybe I’m wrong lmao. The characters were also designed by a Takashi Okazaki, who did illustrations for “Afro Samurai” manga and it shows they were designed by manga illustrator. The Game Bakers is a French studio and on top of having English and French VO you can also play with Japanese VO.

When I first beated Furi I felt like giving it 7/10 but the more I played the more I liked this game and its combat system. So yeah, 8/10 it is, my 3rd beaten game this year and so far it’s the best! Easy recommendation.