I’m just one person with one itty-bitty brain, and sometimes videogames have too many darn buttons. What do you mean I already need four of ’em just to move, and then another one to jump, and an extra one to crouch, and then I still need another one to move faster? That’s too much digit gymnastics going on for my fingers.
Sometimes less is more. What if, instead of having loads of buttons to do stuff, games just had one? It sounds like that would be kinda bad, but Midnight Munchies’ ONE BTN BOSSES has proven to me that you don’t need a myriad of inputs to have a good time.
If the name wasn’t already a dead giveaway, ONE BTN BOSSES has a simple enough premise: Use a single button—spacebar by default, but you can change it—to direct your little arrow fella around a geometric shape while another geometric thing throws all manner of attacks at you.
Maybe it’s all the time I’ve spent raiding in Final Fantasy 14 these past couple of weeks, but I was prepared for everything ONE BTN BOSSES threw at me. Conal AOEs, shapes that gradually grew in size, line attacks I had to keep tabs on and missiles that would track and shoot towards me were just some of the strikes I had to deftly avoid. Sometimes a boss will only focus on one of these, but tougher foes will throw two or more of these attack types out at once.
Button bashing
When I start out, hitting the spacebar lets me change which direction my arrow travels in. The longer I go without hitting the spacebar, the faster I go and the more bullets I can shoot: which often left me gambling whether I should continue barreling towards an attack and hope I barely missed it, or change course and ramp my acceleration back up again.
As I sank more time into the game, it let me swap this behaviour out for different movement abilities, like being able to dash through hits or slowly charging up in one place before dashing ahead while unleashing bullet hell. I was also able to change my weapons too, and I became particularly fond of one that I had to go and pick back up every time I threw it.
ONE BTN BOSSES starts off in a campaign mode that walks you through the basics, but I really started having fun once the roguelike mode unlocked. It made each fight far more interesting, and I was able to upgrade or twist how each aspect of my movement and damage worked. I could gain extra pickup weapons, or kill my acceleration in exchange for a massive max speed upgrade. Trying to find a build that worked kept me so busy I straight-up forgot to ever go back to the campaign.
Admittedly, it does get a bit one-note after a while. I seemed to roll the same attack types every time for the roguelike mode despite there being a number of options. ONE BTN BOSSES only has a select few enemy types to draw from as well, meaning that after a few hours it felt like I’d already seen each boss dozens of times. Part of that is down to the fact that these fights rarely last anything over a minute—something I really enjoyed about the game. While it meant my exposure to each boss was significantly higher, it also meant I was never forced to dwell on a particular type for too long. It also meant that early on, when I was trying to navigate their patterns, it wasn’t too frustrating if I lost all my health and had to restart.
While ultimately the repetitive enemies do get tiring, part of the fun (in campaign mode, at least) is trying to squeeze every last drop of optimisation in order to score a high rank. I was rarely able to scrape anything above a B rank, and I’ll no doubt be combing my way back through levels now I have a wealth of movement and damage options unlocked in order to climb my way up to that sweet S-rank.
ONE BTN BOSSES is one of those games I could blink and spend two hours in without even realising. Heck, I did. That simplicity makes it a great pick-up-and-play game, with enough small goals to work towards that make each tiny run feel part of a satisfying whole. If you’re burned-out on macros, and the kind of game with 50 inputs, ONE BTN BOSSES shows just how much you can get done with one.
