This is not a review of Furi
All games are special. The titans codify genres or are outstanding examples of them (here’s looking at you, Dark Souls). More often games contain a few elements that make them impossible to ignore, little flecks of gold trapped in quartz, and these fuel Signal Decay’s creative output. Then there are the games that are special not because of what they are, but when you played them.
For me that’s Furi, the 2016 fighter from the Game Bakers. You can find detailed run-downs of the mechanics elsewhere. [1] Simply, Furi is a boss-rush where each fight is a mixture of bullet-hell segments followed by a close-up duel. Furi has tight gamepad controls, and the gameplay is built around precise timing, good reactions, and pattern recognition. The story is as delightful and transitory as campfire smoke. I’ll say no more. More immediate while playing is the luminous visual design, which oozes character like a punctured tin of golden syrup dripping onto a colour-changing lightbulb. Wonderful, despite their rough edges.
Furi is special because I played it once, then again four years later; a month or so before and after my graduate degree. Without even thinking about the game in that time, I bookended an eventful portion of my life with Furi. I only noticed because on replaying Furi the soundtrack struck me like a hammer. My “work/study” playlist has a lot of videogame OST’s on it, including most of the Furi OST. It is an outstanding electronic soundtrack; you get the pulsing neon beats of “Make This Right”, the frozen rain drops of “Enraged”, each drumming a steady tempo that is suffused with electric desperation from inexorable grind of the player advancing through the game. And now it transports me away from the present moment. When I hear “Something Memorable”, I see clearly in my mind both the duel with The Edge in Furi and my own struggles as a post-graduate balancing life and research. The two are interwined.
If this was a game review, I would say that Furi is not too difficult and it can be fun. For me though Furi is reminiscent (not nostalgic), a link to a time and a place that have since passed. What’s your Furi?
References
[1] Furi Review, Joseph Anderson, YouTube, 2016. Link.
This work is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0