Four attack chains, every one of them announced by a movement you can see from across the arena, and not a single frame of the fight that depends on knowing what happens next. We logged two hundred and six attempts to find out how a fight this large stays legible.
Every fight in this game is designed for a creature larger than the room it is in, and the lock-on cannot see what is about to hit you.
Three phases that look like a fight and behave like a cutscene you can fail. Our attempt log shows why it feels hollow at attempt four.
Every review on this site is written from the encounters outward. Not because bosses are the only thing in a game worth discussing, but because a boss is the moment a game states its rules plainly, and a game that cheats will cheat here first. We log every attempt, time every tell, and count how many deaths came from a mistake we could name.
How long a wind-up lasts before the damage lands, recorded from capture footage rather than estimated. A fight where the shortest tell is under nine frames is not asking for reactions, it is asking for memorisation.
How many tries it takes to get through a phase without taking damage. This separates a fight that teaches from one that simply outlasts you, and it is the single most predictive number we collect.
The share of deaths where we could state what we did wrong. A fight where you cannot explain your own failures is not difficult, it is opaque, and no amount of spectacle fixes that.
Whether the room is large enough for the creature in it, whether the lock-on can hold the part of the boss that is attacking, and how often the fight is lost to geometry rather than to the enemy.
Nineteen bosses, all of them large, all of them readable. The Warden alone justifies the game, and the fight that follows it is nearly as good.
A duelling game with four bosses and no filler between them. Punishing, entirely fair, and the only game this issue where we never blamed the camera.
Excellent creature design trapped in rooms two sizes too small, with a lock-on that surrenders every time a boss changes shape.
The most impressive thing we have looked at this year and the least interesting to play twice. Phase transitions are scripted to the second.
A horror game whose bosses are conversations you can lose. Two of them cannot be fought at all, and the game is better for it.
One boss, fought eleven times, changed slightly each time. An idea good enough that we spent a week arguing about whether it was a boss at all.
Twenty-eight bosses, six of which are the same fight with more health. Volume mistaken for variety, but the six good ones are very good.
An enormous armoured creature you fight by dismantling it, which works exactly once. The second encounter reveals how little is underneath.
Across the archive we have timed the shortest tell in four hundred and eleven boss encounters. The distribution has a cliff in it. Above roughly eleven frames, players describe a fight as hard. Below nine, they describe it as unfair — and they say so at almost exactly the same attempt count, regardless of how much damage the attack does.
This matters because a great many games attempt to raise difficulty by shortening wind-ups, which is the cheapest lever available and the one that most reliably converts a challenging fight into a memorisation exercise. The alternative — more attack variety, longer chains, arenas that ask something of you — costs more to build and is what every fight in our top ten does instead.
Two hundred and six attempts on one fight and I could still tell you what killed me every single time. That is the whole review of Crowned Ash in one sentence.
Hangar Cluster has the best monster in the issue and I spent a third of my deaths looking at a wall. Nothing about that is the creature's fault.
By the fourth attempt on Tidewake I knew the whole fight, because it is the same forty seconds every time. Enormous, and over the moment you see the seams.
