It’s always nice when a game presents a sole conceit and executes on it as promised. That’s exactly what you get with ONE BTN BOSSES, a single-screen shooter that, true to its name, has you using a single button to dodge and destroy increasingly complex bosses.
Games that don’t demand more than a single input aren’t necessarily anything new. There’s the whole sub-genre that Vampire Survivors summoned into wider popularity, in which players need only move their characters around the screen as they automatically attack in an attempt to survive as long as possible. ONE BTN BOSSES doesn’t quite fit into that niche, instead tasking players with pressing a single face button to switch the direction (or another aspect) of their ship along a fixed plane.
Between the simple and clean gimmick to the overall look, developer Midnight Munchies has delivered one of the most confident demos I’ve played so far during Steam Next Fest.
Just press the button
ONE BTN BOSSES recently appeared as part of a showcase for Outersloth, an indie games fund created by Among Us developer Innersloth. Prior to that, an earlier version of it could be found floating on various browser game communities like Newgrounds dating back to 2021. Now that the team has funding, they can finally build toward the full release. There’s currently no date in place, but what’s available in the demo shows a ton of promise.
In the few seconds you’re introduced to the concept at hand, you’ll know exactly what to do in this unique spin on the boss rush. As each battle begins, your ship automatically orbits the boss. That “one button” you’ve heard so much about is just there to switch the direction of your orbit. Doing so will kill your momentum, and the faster you move around the boss the faster your ship fires its bullets.
Survival in ONE BTN BOSSES quickly becomes a game of risk vs. reward. If you can keep your momentum going, you’ll chip away at their health bar that much faster. Sounds easy enough, but are you sure you’ll circle the boss in time to skirt past the incoming wave of missiles? If you’d rather play it safe, you can continuously dodge left and right along the line and take your time. As the difficulty increases, though, it becomes clear that being bold and efficient has its advantages.
Mix it up
While the demo just outfits you with the basic loadout at first — with at least one more unlocking after — it looks like the final game will have a lot of ways to change up your playstyle. You can customize your ship with different attack and movement upgrades, which even switches up how the button works. If the direction-swapping move isn’t cutting it, you can opt for a dash, or you can fire lasers instead of bullets. Midnight Munchies promises over 100 combinations in the final version.
All told, there are 50 planned fights as far as handcrafted levels are concerned. You can choose different paths of progression along the way, so if you’re stuck on a particularly tough boss you can always try another route. Beyond the main game, there’s a roguelite-inspired R&D (Rifts & Discoveries) department that tosses randomly-generated bosses into the mix. New power-ups and upgrades can be picked up after fights, offering up a bunch of different playthrough possibilities.
What’s next? TWO buttons?
It’s amazing what a little presentation can do. ONE BTN BOSSES comes out of the gate with the notion that you already get it. It has a sense of humor and its die-and-retry stylings are, at least in the small slice the demo has to share, well handled. I’m most interested in how they plan to make each boss unique without leaning on “more bullets and obstacles.” There are already examples in the demo of different type of lines for your ship that aren’t traditional orbits. One of the fights has you gliding across an angled line that teleports the ship back from one end to the other, like a looping single-screen arcade game.
You can try ONE BTN BOSSES for yourself right now. If you don’t have time for that, the three-person dev team has been sharing some live-play broadcasts on Steam. One thing’s for sure, by the time this one launches in full, I’m pretty sure I’ll still remember how to play.
