This is sort of like a bite-sized 2D version of Shadow of the Colossus. (Despite what the name may lead you to think, it doesn’t actually have much similarity to Dark Souls.) You play as a tiny human fighting massive monsters, with some environmental storytelling hinting at surrounding context.
Here’s the most notable about this game: You only have one hit, but so do the bosses. One hit to their weak point and that’s it, you’re done. This has blown my mind in regards to how I think about game design and game challenges, and I’m going to vomit those thoughts at you now.
Caveat: there are a few twists on this rule, like some bosses that require additional hits to expose their weak points, but all the fights can be finished very quickly if you know what you’re doing. I actually managed to get an achievement for killing a boss in under 10 seconds without even trying for it! This stuck out to me because most video game boss fights, even the more puzzle-y ones, are protracted slugfests that require you to strike the boss’ weak point many times.
Having that stripped away made me wonder… why? What does it add, actually? Once you’ve figured out how to hit the boss once, then unless the fight meaningfully changes afterwards, you’ve basically already won. The rest is just padding. (And I must say, it also does a lot more to respect the player’s time — if you get splatted midway, you haven’t actually lost any progress, as opposed to if the boss had a massive healthbar.) I suppose you could argue you have to do it multiple times to prove it’s not a fluke, but I find that a pretty weak argument. It was actually exciting to win several titan battles through lucky shots I just kinda hoped and prayed for.
Moreover, the game proves that doing this doesn’t require sacrificing challenge. The boss fights are all incredibly engaging, and extremely difficult despite how quickly you can win them. Despite usually having an obvious weak point, the bosses are actually very good at protecting them — you have extremely small windows to hit them, and their vulnerable states feel like realistic tactical slip-ups rather than a video game holding your hand. For example: One of the early bosses is one of those statues with detached fists that fly around to smash you, typical video game boss design. It has a huge glowing weak spot on its chest… but it actually uses those giant stone fists to cover its weak spot, so you can’t just take free potshots. The only way to beat it is to trick it into attacking you with both fists at once, then attack it in the split-second before it can retract its fist to cover itself again. That’s exactly the kind of genuine, split-second mistake people make in real battles, and I felt like a real tactical genius when I actually pulled it off. If that were a Zelda boss, it would leave both its fists idle for several seconds to give you a nice leisurely window to shoot it (if it bothered to do the guarding trick at all), but you’d have to shoot it like ten times. This equitable health model makes every battle genuinely tense, because the slightest mistake can mean sudden death for either side. It is, I think, the kind of tone Sekiro was trying to shoot for.
Of course, by trimming all the fat the game does end up very lean — I beat every boss, including the secret bonus boss, in under 4 hours. But those were a really great 4 hours, and the game has perhaps the highest satisfaction-to-playtime ratio I’ve experienced. This is a game that every action game designer should study, and ask themselves if they really need to include all that padding.
As an RPG designer, I do wonder how this principle might be applied to a more cerebral, turn-based experience. Truthfully, a lot of RPG battles are quite repetitive and can be won by simply repeating the same basic strategy. But with no skill element, you can’t just set everyone’s HP to 1 like you can in an action game, can you? You could perhaps require the player to counter an extremely complex strategy by the enemy before you can land an attack, but then that becomes less of an RPG and more just a straight-up puzzle game. I don’t know the answer, but it’s definitely something worth pondering.