Furi is a game that is consistently a point of contention between me and my designer friends. I don't believe there is another game where everyone I know feels equally mixed about it. I have not played this game since 2021, and despite not liking it that much I have continued to think about this game since.

On one hand, Furi is a strikingly cool character-action boss-rush game. On the other, it is a half-baked bullet-hell with a narrative that wants to expand beyond the confines of its game. Quite literally, half of this game is pretty good, and the other half is pretty bad. It's almost impressive how balanced it is.

So, the good: Furi looks fantastic. The aesthetic is awesome, the music is fantastic (Toxic Avenger AND Carpenter Brut AND Waveshaper? Sign me the fuck up!), and the melee combat is detailed and polished. From the outside, if you look at the visuals, the close combat and the music, like I did before I got into the title, you'd think it's contender for best indie title ever made. Each character is teeming with personality, the narrative background is captivating, and each boss feels equally unique. So, great! Where do I sign up?

Well, you'd have to get past the other half of the game first. Each boss (save The Edge) opens in a bullet-hell segment that is ultimately very boring and undercooked. It feels a lot like an afterthought, just put into the game to give it draw, to say "Look! We're two things at once!" It's unremarkable. Each boss that leans heavy into this aspect is boring (The Song) and frustrating (The Line & The Star). Though, when you get through that, the close-combat sections are infectiously fun. It's fluid, refined, responsive. It really feels like you're a space samurai. The camera work for it is equally cool, and with the flashy visuals it's insanely fun to play with. After that, the loop repeats and you're back to swapping between playing a bullet-hell and an action title. The two modes are too antithetical to each other to really flow well between each other. Had this game focused on either or, it could have been much cooler, or at the very least more divisive.

The story is the other gripe I commonly hear echoed with this game. Furi very clearly wants to have this deep and expansive narrative, giving massive lore dumps between boss fights as you traverse these very nice looking environments. A lot of the monologues are context to each boss, who they are to you, what you are to them, but it's all done so vaguely you don't really get a sense for what the world actually is. The game speaks of all these past altercations, wars, and worlds but never gets to show us outside of that or even what those events were. No lore books, descriptions, or even an outside wiki to give us more insight into what anything is. It's beyond interesting and we just have to guess, which is really unfortunate.

What's more unfortunate is that these environments you traverse. They're very nicely crafted, and look equally distinct, but they're just that. A single path from A to B so you can get this exposition dump. Furi is so focused on just being a boss rush that when it isn't boss rushing you it forgets about the narrative it wants to tell (that it is CURRENTLY TELLING YOU). These in-between zones could have been more open, and through that let us find bits of the lore to complete this story that it wants to tell, but they don't. There was very much an opportunity here to expand and it was overlooked, seemingly to not retract from the boss rushing. Furi does all of this monologuing to make you care about the boss you're about to throw down on, but with how little you're given it's hard to care at all. The narrative, much like the bullet-hell, is an afterthought tossed in to check a box. I'd like this game more if it didn't have any at all, because then I wouldn't be met with the unsatisfying nothingness that is the captivating concept of a world they've made. Cool ideas are planted but nothing grows from that. The story is really just a bunch of cool ideas.

What Furi needs is a sequel. The world has so much setup to it and no give. There is clearly a story that wants to be told, there is so much to it, but there's nothing outside what you're told. The melee combat is great, but the overall gameplay is detracted by the bullet-hell mode. Furi needs a title that will lean into its positives, having strong melee combat, cool visuals, and good music while having a structure that lets its narrative grow.

Furi had a lot of potential. It does a lot right. It also does a lot wrong. It's aggravating. I want to like this game, but it's ultimately unsatisfying. It is the perfect 5/10. Perfectly balancing it's bad with good. The perfectly mixed game. Is it worth your time? Maybe. You will find something to like, but you won't be able to like all of it.