Boss battle compendium delivers the epic writ small
Titan Souls! That sounds familiar, and very deliberately so. The title of this genre-eluding indie-something makes very deliberate reference to the games of Hidetaka Miyazaki – Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls and now Bloodborne – a reference which is both warranted and not.
Unwarranted because Titan Souls isn’t an RPG. You won’t develop skills, up your stats, or slowly carve out a character build – instead you’ll stay the same huddle of appealing pixels, a dot-eyed hunter with a bow, a single arrow and a good line in dramatic diving-out-the-way. While you will explore a mysterious landscape, there are no NPCs to engage with, no regular supply of enemies to grind, no villages to discover. Instead, there are environmental puzzles – puzzles which imaginatively toy with the limited ways you have of interacting with this world of stone steps and clearings – and, most of all, there are bosses.
There are 20 of these fights in all, and finding bosses and then killing them is the strippeddown purpose of Titan Souls. Each one has a pattern, a vulnerability, and efficient ways of making you dead, at which point you respawn at the latest activated glyph and try again. In other words, while Titan Souls hasn’t adopted the wider approach of the Souls series, is has adopted a very specific philosophy attached to them: a philosophy of resilience and repetition.
This is a philosophy of both designing and playing, and, in Miyazaki’s games, it doesn’t just apply to bosses. It is the approach that devises areas and enemies which, on the first encounter, flatten you with despairing ease. It’s the approach that gives us those moments (and From Software’s games give us many) that feel like running blinkered face-first into the bottom of a high brick wall, looking up, and seeing how far there is to climb.
It’s also the approach that drives us, as players, to run back into that wall repeatedly. That makes a virtue of patience and perseverance, so we might slowly prise open a gap between ‘Hello’ and a death in which we can learn to live, seconds at a time, understanding, solving and repeating. For veterans of the Souls games, this comes with an exquisite sort of blind faith, with a sense of knowing that, despite any evidence to the contrary, the apparently sheer face of difficulty currently rendering our faces featureless shall evenutally pass.
In one sense this is a very long way of saying that Titan Souls involves a lot of dying and starting again. But it’s more than that. It’s also to get at the fact that Titan Souls is a game of insoluble extremes – of ignorance and endurance – as bosses are met and investigated through multiple reincarnations, and then brief, vengeful moments of triumph when they are finally defeated.
It’s therefore a game that’s hard to enjoy except in bursts, unless you’re able to masochistically embrace the repetition, to love the gradual task of establishing yourself in the fray of imminent demise and the incremental nudging of often haphazard progress. I checked my stats around halfway through the game to find I’d died a total of 58 times in two hours of play. About once every two minutes. And then it got harder.
Working to leaven the frustration and futility is the elegance of Titan Souls’ combat. It has a very strong yet simple gameplay hook – your hunter has one bow, one solitary arrow and a magical ability to call this arrow, once fired, back to hand. This means that every fight can be won with a single, well-directed shot (your arrow is manually aimed with the right stick) which in turn makes every boss, no matter how daunting, seem suddenly beatable.
I haven’t gone into the details of specific bosses – the patterns, the designs, the arenas – because these are the unrenewable resources of Titan Souls. Discovery here is everything, and while that might means the game isn’t particularly replayable, we shouldn’t underestimate the fact that it’s very playable in the first place. Nathan Ditum
Titan Souls is a game you’ll play once about killing things once with one shot of your single arrow, but it’s also a meaningful exploration of the frustration and release of boss battling.