Fights we would hand to somebody learning how to build one
Crowned Ash
Nineteen bosses, all large, all readable from across the arena. The Warden is the best single encounter we have logged, and the fight after it is nearly as good. Two hundred and six attempts and not one death we could not account for.
Spire Of Glass
A duelling game with four bosses and nothing in between them. The shortest tell in the game is thirteen frames, which is close to our fairness cliff, and it works because every attack has a distinct silhouette.
Encounters with a genuine idea in them
Ember Antler
One boss fought eleven times, altered slightly on each meeting so that your accumulated knowledge is always nearly enough. The best structural idea in the issue, undermined only by a final variant that abandons the pattern.
Hollow Choir
A horror game in which two of the five bosses cannot be fought and must be survived, understood or refused. The three that can be fought are ordinary; the two that cannot are the reason the score is this high.
Good work with a structural problem we could name
Sable Ring
Twenty-eight bosses, nine of which are earlier fights with a larger health pool and a recoloured effect. Six are excellent. The arithmetic of the remaining thirteen is the whole review.
Tidewake
The most visually impressive encounter of the year, and by the fourth attempt an entirely known quantity. All three phase transitions fire on a timer rather than on damage, and once you see that you cannot unsee it.
Fights defeated by something other than their own design
Canyon Shell
An armoured creature dismantled plate by plate, which is thrilling exactly once. The eight-frame slam beneath the plating is the shortest tell in the archive and the reason half our deaths have no explanation.
Hangar Cluster
Six enormous machines in five rooms too small to hold them, with a lock-on that releases every time a boss changes configuration. Thirty-one per cent of our deaths were to geometry, the worst figure we have recorded.
How to read these four numbers without letting them decide for you
Attempts are not difficulty. A fight logged at two hundred attempts may be one we kept returning to because it was worth learning, and a fight logged at forty-four may be one we abandoned as soon as it stopped surprising us. Read attempts alongside the named-cause figure and the picture resolves.
The named-cause share is the number we trust most. It answers whether the fight communicated, which is the only question a boss encounter has to get right. Everything else — spectacle, health pools, phase count — is decoration around that.
- Attempts How long the fight held our attention
- Shortest tell The narrowest window it demands
- Camera deaths Failures the fight did not intend
- Named causes Whether we could explain ourselves
- Score Whether the encounters were worth the hours