Did you ever wonder what would happen if someone took Furi, and stripped all story out of it?
The answer is Profane, a 3D top-down Boss Game, developed by OverPowered Team and released for PC through Steam on October 24th, 2019. Its premise is about the last Herald, Talaal, finding her brethren corrupted and having to put them down one by one, and that's as far as its story ever goes.
Gameplay-wise, Profane has the same ranged combat as Furi, with the default blue Frickin' Laser Beamsand a Charged Attack briefly replacing them with a long, blue beam, and also the same dashing mechanic that makes player character invulnerable. However, it entirely lacks melee combat, instead replacing it with a castable spells. There's also a strict timer for each battle, which doubles as both Talaal's health and currency. This is designed to prevent the players from drawing out the battles or cheesing them through buying up upgrades.
Tropes present in this game:
- Action Girl: According to the Steam description, Talaal is female.
- Animal Mecha: The fourth boss, Mobus, is a robotic worm thing, able to shoot from every segment. Unlike many similar examples, it cannot dig, but it moves very quickly between the two tunnels in the arena's walls instead. It is also the only boss with just two phases.
- Bullet Hell: Even the Tutoriaal is able to completely flood the screen with projectiles in his very first phase! The subsequent bosses do not let up.
- Convection, Schmonvection: Drakhul has a rather small area surrounded by lava. The heat from it will never bother Talaal.
- Crosshair Aware: Tutoriaal's second phase has a long attack where lilac beams will keep coming down from the sky until you destroy the ring of boulders he generated to protect himself. (Moreover, each boulder will also melt into several lava projectiles when destroyed.) Luckily, the arrival of each beam is preceded by a lilac circle appearing where it'll land. Other bosses' overhead attacks get a similar warning.
- Cyber Cyclops: Duhm is a robot boss with just one eye. Ironically, while the trope is usually used to create emotional distance, here it is probably the most approachable-looking of all bosses. The whimpering sound it makes when hit in its third and final phase will outright make you feel bad.
- Deadly Walls: Ylaudit has a swirling energy vortex for its area's walls. Cindael's area is surrounded by a ring of energy pikes.
- Defeat Equals Explosion: The fate of every single boss.
- Dishing Out Dirt: Tutoriaal is a levitating golem-thing, and his attacks are related to stones in some ways, whether it is by directly throwing boulders or causing stalagmites to emerge from the ground, or something more implicit, like generating a lot of lava projectiles.
- Doppelgänger Attack: Drakhul's second and third phases can create a lot of smaller phantom skulls. Some will simply float around and damage Talaal by contact, but others will also generate rings of projectiles in the second phase, and cones in the third.
- Driven to Suicide: The game ends with Talaal taking off the mask after defeating the Final Boss and immediately dying herself.
- Dual Wielding: Garodal's second phase generates two large cleavers with charged blades.
- Energy Ball: Most bosses' projectiles are some form of this.
- Evil Laugh: Drakhul is quite fond of such a laugh when doing particularly impressive attacks in his skull phases.
- Excuse Plot: Unlike Furi, the boss battles are completely devoid of narration, and there are no narrated transitions between the battles either, with Talaal getting teleported to the next boss immediately after defeating the previous one. All the storytelling is limited to three written lines: "This is but one of the stories spoken by those who survived at the start" as the game loads; "Unfortunately, it is me. I am the last Herald" before the first boss, and "There must be slaves. As long as I own my conscience, there's only one way I can serve freedom" at the end, which precedes Talaal's suicide.
- Final Boss, New Dimension: Subverted. Ylaudit is the one boss whose battle takes place in an arena rendered like a canonical "boss dimension" - a mad blur of color with seemingly nothing solid anywhere, a few distant stars seen through the floor, and a whirling vortex acting as the arena's borders that'll kill Talaan if she touches it. However, it is only the sixth boss out of ten.
- The actual Final Boss is instead fought in the game's starting area that was seemingly designed only to tell you the controls. Its third phase, though, where he also assumes Talaal's appearance and abilities, appears to play the trope straight, again being clearly space-themed with entire constellations seen below the arena and there again being a whole ring of deadly energy gating it. However, the battle goes back to normal in his fourth and final phase.
- Flash of Pain: The bosses flash white when hit.
- Giant Spider: Nuraanag is the game's seventh boss, and is a large arachnid with a huge belly area. It is completely immobile in its first two phases, but then its belly bursts, leaving only the much nimbler thorax, which starts chasing you around the area.
- Hand Blast: Garodal is able to fire orange beams from his hands.
- Mirror Match: The third phase of the final boss, Garodal, has him assume Talaal's form and abilities.
- Morph Weapon: The ninth boss, Cindael, wields a futuristic spear charged with green energy in his first phase. He then changes it into a halberd for the second phase, a scythe into a third, and then to a (slightly different) halberd in the fourth and final phase.
- One-Winged Angel: The third boss, Drakhul, begins the battle as an immobile bug-like carapace in the center of the area that just shoots a lot of red projectiles. Defeating its first phase causes that carapace to burst, and a large floating skull emerges instead.
- Power Floats: Sentiel and Cindael are two humanoid bosses fought one after the other, who float above the ground. They are followed by the Final Boss, Garodal, who is also a humanoid, yet who stands on his own two feet.
- Practical Currency: An interesting variation. Your "currency" to purchase upgrades is also the time allotted to beat each boss. Thus, buying too many upgrades too early can easily leave you completely lacking the actual time to use them.
- Punny Name: The tutorial boss is straight-up named Tutoriaal.
- Recursive Ammo: One of Tutoriaal's attacks in his last phase is to throw a hot boulder, which will then split into a circle of lava projectiles radiating backwards when it hits the wall.
- The subsequent boss, Khalepo, fires four large orbs that split into six small ones when they hit the walls as his first phase's standard attack.
- The fifth boss, Duhm, gets the ability to fire comparable orbs in his second phase.
- Sequential Boss: Every boss has at least two phases. Three is the standard, and a few have four.
- Shock and Awe: Nuraanag's second phase will generate orange orbs around the arena, which will then radiate lightning around them. It does that again during the fourth phase.
- Sinister Scythe: Cindael's weapon transforms into a scythe for his third phase. Besides simply swinging it around, he can also use it to generate five scythes spinning in circles, or just flood the arena with a lot of scythe blades.
- Spin Attack: Cindael uses his scythe form to chase after Talaan and regularly spin around with the scythe.
- Spread Shot: Essentially every boss has some sort of attack that sends projectiles in a cone or a circular pattern. Talaal can eventually buy an ability to temporarily fire her basic projectiles in spread of five as well.
- Timed Mission: The entire game is on a strict timer, and taking damage further takes away from that timer. Moreover, you can also spend some of your remaining time in order to purchase upgrades for Talaal.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Garodal can throw both of his swords in his second phase, which will immediately come back to his hands afterwards.
- Where It All Began: The Final Boss, Garodal, is fought in the game's starting area, where the player is quickly told how to control their character and buy abilities before they are teleported into the boss arenas.
