ONE BTN BOSSES [Review]
Work your way up the corporate ladder by surviving bullet hell bosses.
ONE BTN BOSSES. Credit: Midnight Munchies / Outersloth
Midnight Munchies’ ONE BTN BOSSES is a deceptively simple boss rush game played with a single button. Streamlined and stylish pixel art visuals ensure that the action is the focus of this addictive game.
You are a triangular spaceship that must climb a bizarre corporate ladder by defeating bosses for promotions. Guided by your unpaid (?) assistant Ace and occasionally facing off against HR—hint robot—you fight to shatter the glass ceiling to get to the top. The game has brief dialogue from your assistant and the bosses, which is quite funny and illuminating for the game’s theme of labor struggles.
ONE BTN BOSSES. Credit: Midnight Munchies / Outersloth
Your task in each level is simple: defeat the boss. Your triangle is locked to a track and fires automatically. Tap a button to change directions to dodge bullets. That’s it. It may sound simple, but ONE BTN BOSSES is very hard.
The longer you move in one direction, the faster you move and fire, so changing directions too frequently means it’ll take you longer to win. Bullet patterns and hazards thrown at you by the boss will get increasingly dense and complex.
You’ll unlock new movement and weapon modules as you earn points for your performance. None of these change the game’s controls, but they do change how it plays. For example, a laser weapon relies on you picking up power-ups on your movement track to gain power. One of the movement modules allows you to stop if you hold down the button before switching directions when you let go. So far, I prefer playing with the default options, but there’s a lot to challenge yourself with here.
ONE BTN BOSSES. Credit: Midnight Munchies / Outersloth
The game has 50 levels in its story mode. Once I got past level 15 or so, each boss started taking me many, many attempts to defeat. Even with this beefy amount of content, ONE BTN BOSSES also has an R&D—Rifts & Developments—roguelike mode that becomes available early in the game.
The game’s graphics are pixel-based, with simple but stylish art. Backgrounds are solid color, and all game elements are flat, outlined shapes. The limited color palette helps to keep the player’s attention hyperfocused on the action, where timing is everything. You’ll begin with two color palettes and earn more as you play; thank goodness a dark mode palette is one of the defaults.
ONE BTN BOSSES. Credit: Midnight Munchies / Outersloth
The game is challenging, but that’s ok. What frustrated me was that it takes too long to restart a level if you lose because skipping through the results screen isn’t fast enough. If I were to pause the game and restart a level, it would be instantaneous, and I should be able to restart that quickly if I lose. The delay is just a few seconds, but those few seconds become interminable when I have to retry a level dozens of times. I hope that the developers patch this in.
ONE BTN BOSSES is an addictive, challenging shooter. You won’t notice time fly by as you try again just one more time, then just another one more time, and then another.
ONE BTN BOSSES is available now on PC (Steam).
Overall Score: 8/10
Played on: Steam Deck
