Have You Played... Furi?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

Furi is a game about killing weird and imaginative cyber-monstrosities in one-on-one battles. I had a nightmare about it last night.

In films, people sometimes wake from a nightmare and immediately sit bolt upright in bed with a look of terror on their face. They might even gasp or let out a yelp. Whenever I see a scene like that I think, "that doesn't happen in real life".

Last night, I woke from a nightmare and immediately sat bolt upright in bed with a look of terror on my face. In my dream, I had been reading through my old reviews* and saw that I'd been absolutely horrid about Furi, a game that I remember liking very much. My actual review is extremely positive but the nightmare was so convincing that I actually had to look it up on my iPad in the middle of the night to reassure myself.

In the nightmare version of the review, I complained about the time it takes to get from one battle to the next, and said that the weakest of the fights were bad enough to kill all the goodwill the best of them had earned. I said that the character designs were trying too hard to be odd and eye-catching, and ended up feeling disjointed and messy. Worst of all, I said that it was difficult in the worst way - using unpredictable patterns and overwhelming the player with senseless screens of bullets and lasers.

That is a review written by an idiot. Thankfully, it doesn't exist.

I'd forgotten about Furi until that nightmare though, so I'm thankful for the shock to my system. It's a brilliant game that got lost in the shuffle somewhat, and if you like the idea of stylish bossfights with a whole lot of variety and some absolutely stunning visual design, you should check it out.

Just make sure never to listen to Nightmare Adam. He's a fool.

* this is, sadly, not the first time I've had a dream about reading my own reviews. My sleeping mind once managed to convince me that I'd written a really odd review of an Assassin's Creed FPS spin-off and I genuinely had a moment right after waking in which I thought, "shit, people are going to realise that game doesn't exist any minute now and wondered if I could delete the whole thing without anyone noticing.