This year has, unfortunately for me, been all about a handful of Big Projects. I’m very grateful to have them, but I haven’t really had the opportunity to sit down and enjoy smaller games because I’m off doing some random nonsense with a 15-year-old AAA shooter series or fiddling with the layout of a magazine. There have been games I’ve absolutely wanted to play, but either didn’t have the time or lately, the money, to do so. And there are upcoming games that I’ve had to basically resolve to carve out time and money and energy for.
BOSSGAME: The Final Boss Is My Heart was not a game on my radar. I got an email from a new PR company asking if I’d like to play it. Below the message, in the body copy of the press release, I saw: “lesbian boss rush.” “Lightning fast combat.” “Reminiscent of Undertale.” “Can you prove that stubborn optimism and the power of love are a match for any evil?” Based on just that line alone I emailed the PR company (shoutouts to Pop Top PR) and said “I’d love to check this out.” I meant it. Even if the end product turned out not to be for me, I couldn’t not.
So, uh, as it turns out, BOSSGAME is extremely fucking for me.
BOSSGAME: The Final Boss Is My Heart (hereafter, just BOSSGAME, by Lily Valeen) is a semi-turn-based action game for iOS and Android ($6.99 on all platforms so far) with a PC port coming in spring of 2023. It tells the story of Sophie, a swordswoman priestess of Mammon, and her girlfriend, hot-blooded mercenary fire witch Anna, as they fight major demons both internal and external. The very first impression I got was that BOSSGAME was like a primarily-text-based dungeon crawler, but lmao, it literally says it in the name: this is a boss rush game. Every fight, every moment of story progression, is spent battling progressively more difficult bosses one after another. It’s like you get to the end of an old-school PS1-era action-RPG and you can go back and fight all the bosses you’ve unlocked, except that’s just the entire game here – no grinding, no four-hour cutscenes, no item management. All killer, no filler.
Because this was made for mobile in mind, the controls are razor-sharp and dialed in. To attack, you hold the icon on either side of the screen representing Sophie and Anna’s preferred weapon. To block, you press the icons of their faces. You can press and hold a sun and moon icon to do a special attack, and that special attack fills up a power gauge at the bottom that lets you release an ultimate synchronized attack that stuns your enemies when full. You will spend fights alternating between unleashing as many attacks from either of your protagonists as you can (preferably both at the same time) and blocking enemies’ devastating responses—one hit blocked while you’re out of stamina can stun you and one unblocked hit can knock you out. But here’s the best part. Let’s say Anna gets knocked out. Sophie, through your actions, can revive her. All you have to do is press on Anna’s face and through the power of love, Sophie will revive her. This can be risky as the enemy still has a chance to hit and KO Sophie during this time, but as long as either she or Anna remain awake, the fight will continue.
So the game becomes a kind of juggling act that gets faster and more difficult the further you progress: do some damage, block enemy attacks, revive, release your ultimate attack after some time, rinse repeat. Enemies tend to have a specific attack choreography they follow, so even with very difficult fights, after a while you kind of learn their rhythm and can anticipate when, for example, they try to use ultimate attacks of their own. And because this is primarily a mobile game, every action gives haptic feedback. All of this stuff put together feels extremely responsive and crunchy, which I enjoyed.
All of this by itself and I don’t think I would have any problem telling you that this has been my favorite mobile game of the year, purely based on gameplay. Luckily for us, BOSSGAME is also filled with great retro-inspired visuals and inspired writing. Maybe most importantly, this game is gay as hell.
Outside of combat, all dialogue between Sophie, Anna, and the myriad of other characters takes place in a kind of pseudo-text message conversation format that’s become popular in indie games lately, especially those made for mobile. This helps conversations maintain a good pace and allows for a little bit of playfulness in design, as when a character’s disbelief at what our protagonists are telling them grows so big it breaks the format. The writing itself is funny and naturalistic. I was worried at first that it would fall into a kind of quippy style where everything is jokes and “well… THAT happened” and where no moments of drama or tension or reflection are allowed to seep in, but that never occurred. Instead, these text-based interludes help us really get to know Sophie and Anna, experience the highs and lows of their relationship, and get a sense for their relationships with the various other people in their lives, from former lovers to adoptive priest-mothers and even the greedy mayor of Mammon City.
While I loved BOSSGAME by and large, I can’t say that my experience was always 100% enjoyable. Several bosses were frustratingly difficult, with the difficulty curve sometimes spiking sharply from boss to boss. The game only seemed to ever implement an in-fight checkpoint system on the final encounter, so dying became a major setback to progression for me in the latter half of my run. That being said, fights are mostly short and nothing was ever insurmountable, and the nature of the game’s premise meant that I could just put my phone down and try again on a particular boss later.
I was pleasantly surprised by BOSSGAME in just about every way, but perhaps most shocking to me was its list of inspirations, which Lily Valeen included at the end of the credits. While I’m sure I’ve played more than a few games inspired by the likes of Undertale, Touhou and We Know the Devil at this point, very few of those games also felt inspired by such disparate media as Downwell and Kill la Kill; and wildly, to my knowledge, BOSSGAME is the only video game I’ve ever played that was directly inspired by, of all things, Bad Religion’s 2002 hit album (and one of my all-time faves of theirs) Process of Belief. And yet I could see all of these inspirations fit perfectly within BOSSGAME’s two-to-four hour runtime.
Go play this video game, y’all. It’s on your phones and it’s worth every cent.
