Furi Review- Gameplay, Perfected
All Killer, No Filler
In Portugal we have a saying that translates (poorly) to “No one is born taught.” For the curious, the original looks like this: Ninguém nasce ensinado. It is used in a variety of situations, like easing someone’s frustration after they make a mistake on their first day on the job. It’s a logical assessment. After all, most people don’t get things right on their first try.
Thankfully, The Game Bakers aren’t most people. The studio’s debut title, Furi, came out in 2016 and blew minds. Unlike L.A. Noire and the majority of titles that I cover on Steaming The Deck, I had already played Furi, but I did it a few months after it came out, nearly 9 years ago.
The late TotalBiscuit, one of the biggest pioneers in the games media space, had a series that ran alongside his excellent “WTF Is…” called “TotalBiscuit suggests trying…”. On the 4th of July, 2016, almost 9 years ago exactly, he made a video on Furi, praising the game while commentating over his own fight against the second boss. I got the game on PS4 a few weeks later.
While I had forgotten a lot of it, I distinctly remembered the final bossfight, the excellent music, and the fact that I had absolutely loved it. So when I found it on Steam for 1,99€, I immediately bought it bundled with its only paid DLC, which brought an additional character called Onnamusha. It cost me a total of 3,47€, and I genuinely feel like I robbed The Game Bakers.
Here’s why Furi is a masterpiece, and why I’ll buy everything that The Game Bakers bake.
This Furi review is the second entry in my Steaming The Deck column, a non-scheduled series where I cover neglected titles that have been collecting digital dust in my Steam library for far too long, using my recently purchased Steam Deck as a perfect excuse to finally give them the love they deserve.
All Steaming The Deck reviews are littered with spoilers, but Furi is a game that can’t really be spoiled. With that being said, if you are especially sensitive to spoilers, stop reading when you reach “The Guardians” part, and buy the game. It’s on sale on Steam for 1,99€ until July 10th!
What Is Furi?
The Game Bakers like to create unique experiences, so their games are always challenging to describe, let alone fit into a genre. Furi is a top-down twin-stick shooter boss-rush action game. There is a story mostly told in riddles, all characters with the protagonist’s exception are voiced, and the moments between boss fights are spent watching cutscenes or listening to dialogue while playing a walking-simulator section.
Furi bosses have a lot more phases than you’ll be used to, with one phase per life square, but the entire game’s balanced around that. You have three lives. When you finish a boss’s phase, your HP is returned to 100%. When you die in the middle of a fight, the boss’s HP is returned to 100%, resetting the phase.
You get into a fight, you learn through repetition, and you execute the fight well enough to be able to beat the boss. If you get a game over screen in the middle of a fight— which means you lost all three lives—, the fight resets to the beginning. Doesn’t matter if you were in phase 1, or phase 6.
Furi’s combat is split into what I would consider three categories:
Free Form: Most phases in most Furi fights allow players to freely use their sword or pistol as they see fit.
Bullet-Hell: The twin-stick shooter part of Furi comes through boss phases that turn into bullet-hell segments. Most bullets can be parried, dodged, or shot by the player.
Melee Duels: The majority of bosses have two life bars per phase. When you defeat them in the aforementioned free form part, they are downed and need to be struck with your sword. Once you do that, a much shorter phase will begin which becomes a duel where you can’t use your pistol, taking place in a much smaller area around the boss.
The Stranger
My first Furi playthrough was with The Stranger, the game’s default protagonist. Even though I hadn’t played or seen anyone play Furi for almost 9 years, my muscle memory was still relatively fresh. Around three hours after starting, I had beaten the game in the normal difficulty and I only had a Game Over screen once, when I got humbled by The Edge.
The Stranger has two weapons: a sword and a pistol. He sets the game’s base values, being average in everything. Using The Stranger, players can parry, dodge, charge melee and ranged attacks, and charge the damage of their next strike when in the Melee Duel form.
As you progress through the bosses, they will test your prowess in all different areas of The Stranger’s kit, forcing you to learn how to parry, how to dodge, and how to attack as a defensive maneuver. Just through the 3 to 4 hours of time that will take most players to get through the normal difficulty bosses, you’ll finish your playthrough entirely familiar with The Stranger.
And if you are willing to put in the time, you can use the Speedrun mode, which skips all cutscenes and walking sections and just throws you boss after boss as a timer ticks up at the top of your screen, to truly become a master of The Stranger.
The Onnamusha
When I started my second Furi playthrough, I opted for Onnamusha and jumped right into Furier difficulty. Thankfully, The Game Bakers implemented the more difficult setting perfectly. Bosses are indeed tankier, and they do hit harder, but they also have entirely new attacks, and the jump in complexity is massive. You'll need to be a bit of a masochist and able to handle frustration to get through the game in this difficulty, which is why only 2.4% of Steam players have done it.
In a game as mechanically tight and demanding as Furi, playing a new character is essentially playing a new game. The bosses might be the same—which isn’t entirely true if you’re playing on Furier for the first time—, but your character is so distinct that you are playing a considerably different fight. Like The Stranger, Onnamusha has a sword and a pistol, but she has three different stances, which change how those two weapons work, while also affecting her dodge, HP, damage, and speed.
Spark- “Extremely fast stance, with double dash. Heals on parry but inflicts weak damage. Star gauge fills quickly on dodging, parrying and hitting.”
Storm: “Extremely powerful stance but very slow and with a vulnerable jump roll. Star gauge fills slowly”.
Star: “Extremely powerful and fast attack. Time limited”. Can only be activated when the Star Gauge is full.
The way I piloted Onnamusha was by building up the Star Gauge while using Spark by focusing on ranged damage and parries. If I got a perfect parry or a charged melee attack in, I would quickly switch to Storm and dish out a ton of melee damage. As I got more familiar with the character, I started constantly switching between the two forms. The switch is nearly instantaneous, and as long as you don’t get confused, it will make fights go much quicker.
Once the Star Gauge was filled, I used it as soon as I saw an opening. Star Stance is a sort of mixture of the two other forms, the best of both worlds. You are extremely quick, deal a ton of damage, even more than during Storm, and have double dash. The Stance doesn’t last long, though, so activating at a wrong timing or being knocked down during it meant that it was almost entirely wasted.
I got through Furi in its highest difficulty as Onnamusha, and I ended up enjoying her even more than The Stranger. Her skill ceiling is extremely high, and I know that I still had a lot to learn once I put my Steam Deck down. But the feeling of getting through the entire game in Furier difficulty satiated me, and I couldn’t play Furi forever or Steaming The Deck would become This Week On Furi.
The Guardians
Furi bosses are called Guardians, because they are all guarding their own planet from an invader: you. There are 10 Guardians in total, and 12 bosses overall if you include the two from the now free DLC “One More Fight”. Here they are in alphabetical order, with the two DLC bosses at the end:
The Beat
The Burst
The Chain
The Edge
The Hand
The Line
The Scale
The Song
The Star
The Strap
The Flame
Bernard
All bosses are distinct. They look different, play differently, and sound different. Some will focus on ranged damage, others on melee rushes. A few of them will have phases that are completely out of the ordinary, while others will be mechanically unique for the entire fight, breaking the unwritten rules of Furi.
They are organized perfectly in a way that slowly ramps the difficulty up, culminating in a gigantic leap when you kick off the DLC fights. Because the only thing that you can really spoil in Furi are the fights, I will not go deep into any of them, with the exception of The Edge, which I consider the best and most unique in the entire game.
The Edge
As previously mentioned, there are multiple fights that break Furi’s rules. Instead of being split into Free Form, Bullet-Hell, and Melee Duels, they forgo one or two of them and focus entirely on one. This is how The Edge functions. This Guardian fight is a melee duel for all phases with the exception of the last one, which becomes a 2D fighting game.
If you haven’t been practicing your melee skills up to this point, especially the parries, you are in for a rough time. This was my first game over in the normal difficulty, and when I met The Edge again in Furier, I failed for a good hour or so.
Above all other fights, I felt like I was the protagonist while I was fighting The Edge. “Come on, give me something memorable. Something I can learn from, that will make me better”. The Edge’s quotes sum my entire experience with Furi in short sentences. This is a game that I play for memorable moments, for moments that seem so challenging that I’m surprised I got through them. And the best part of Furi is that I was way better when I put the Steam Deck down, than when I grabbed it to boot the game up for the first time.
Unlike all other Guardians, The Edge cheers for you when you die. “Let it out!”, he says, pumping you up. The Game Bakers knew full well how much of a difficulty spike he was when they filled him with such excellent quotes that only play when a player is down. “Do I look unconquerable to you?” Is one of my favorites, but none can surpass this:
”It seems like we’re fighting each other. But we both know that we’re fighting against ourselves.”
Furi isn’t really about fighting The Guardians as The Stranger or Onnamusha. It is a game that would still be great —albeit much worse, don’t get me wrong— even if it was entirely devoid of art, music, voice-lines, and story (Bernard is an excellent example of this). At its core, Furi is an exercise in repetition in which a player is fighting against their limits, getting back up every time they fall and immediately jumping back into the fight again. The Edge might knock you down a bunch of times during the first phase, but when you are getting smacked by his staff in the last phase, you’ll barely notice how quickly you're breezing through that same first phase now.
The Story
I wasn’t sure if I would include a section dedicated to Furi’s story, but I thought about it enough that I would feel bad if I didn’t. Furi’s story isn’t really one you play through, it is one you listen to. As you make your way through the walking-simulator sections, the mysterious man with a bunny mask, aptly named The Voice, tells you a bit about your circumstances.
While the game never tells you what’s true or false, at least not entirely, you can never shake the feeling that he isn’t telling you the truth, or if he his, he’s only sharing the parts that benefit him. Furi’s story isn’t groundbreaking or excellent, but it is told in a way that enriches the experience, doesn’t waste time, and keeps the player thinking after they roll the credits, if they were paying attention.
One interesting detail I’d like to highlight is that, as you might’ve noticed when I listed The Guardians, Furi bosses follow a very specific nomenclature. So when The Voice kept repeating the iconic phrase “The Jailer is the key, kill him and you’ll be free.” With a capital J, I was certain that I would bump into him eventually. Things became more confusing when he started using that sentence with “her” instead of “him”, and you end up leaving Furi without ever facing a boss called “The Jailer”.
I still think about that from time to time. Were all The Guardians considered Jailers? Why not use the plural then? Was he The Jailer all along? Was it The Star?
The Music
There’s no better way to end this then by highlighting what is the most unforgettable part of Furi: the music. It is clear now that The Game Bakers take pride in filling their games with excellent music. Furi, Haven, and the upcoming Cairn feature the work of extremely talented musicians that are always a highlight of the games’ marketing campaigns.
While I hadn’t touched or seen Furi in years, I had never stopped listening to its soundtrack. If you are ever in need of a change up in your workout playlist or if you are at all interested in a more techno vibe, please listen to Furi’s soundtrack. You can also buy it on Steam now (until July 10th 2025) for 7,49€, a 50% discount. Not only does the soundtrack compliment the game perfectly, it is unbelievably good just by itself, devoid of any visual medium.
Here are the talented artists that participated in creating this masterpiece:
I want to finish by highlighting my favorite song in Furi, which I consider to be one of the best songs ever created for a game. It’s called Make This Right and was composed by The Toxic Avenger. Give it a listen, you won’t regret it.
”Excellence is not an art, it’s pure habit. We are what we repeatedly do”.