Although the concept of a “boss rush” game has been around for a while, this sub-genre has become more of a mainstay of indie games in the last decade with the success of titles like Titan Souls, Furi, and Cuphead. Although these games use different gameplay systems, they all share in how they largely eschew conventional formulae of games based around level or dungeon-based progression and instead distill most of a typical playthrough down to their boss fights. It’s a sub-genre I quite enjoy, so I was excited when a game like NanoApostle caught my eye.
NanoApostle is an indie sci-fi hack n’ slash developed by 18Light and published by PQube Games. Like other games under the boss rush umbrella, this game places the vast majority of its emphasis on a series of boss fights which ultimately take up most of its run time. The player must go through a series of challenges as they seek to escape from a digital realm.
Dark Science
NanoApostle has what the publisher describes as a “dark sci-fi” presentation, which generally lends to its pixel-art visual style. You play as an amnesiac girl given the name Anita who fights alongside an autonomous attachment to her back known as Apostle (or Kuro as Anita dubs him). Anita is one of many in a long line of subjects stuck in a rather bleak digitized computer world, made to clear several battles (the game’s boss fights) as part of a bio-weapons experiment. The hope is that she can win her freedom after clearing the requisite fights, but this is far easier said than done.
Interspersed throughout the game are a series of cutscenes and data logs pertaining to what appear to be events in the past of a real-world war involving soldiers and machine-like beings. There’s also a database in the game’s small hub which contains a series of data logs. This all pieces together to form the whole of its story.
NanoApostle is a relatively short game and its story is a proportionally minimal part of the experience. It fits the game’s generally melancholy tone, albeit featuring enough lighter moments to not become outright depressing. There were a couple of moments of the game’s story I quite liked, particularly one little bit in the game’s ending, but it’s mainly there to give you a bit of narrative context more than anything. Ultimately its plot and characters are not much of a draw to the game, as there’s not a ton of depth here, with cutscenes being fairly scarce and rarely taking up much time. I’d go so far as to call the story somewhat incomplete, but I actually think that’s more to its benefit as it does just enough to establish itself without taking up too much time, all while leaving a bit up to the imagination. The story is not a particularly big pro, but not something I considered a con either.
Combat Adaptability
The focus of NanoApostle is ultimately in its combat, as you’ll be spending much of your playthrough fighting a series of bosses. Fights take place in arenas where you’re stuck dueling a ferocious mechanical being, and you must use your somewhat limited toolkit to deplete their health bars (bosses usually having two phases).
Anita and Kuro have a relatively standard moveset for this sort of action game. You have the ability to do basic attacks, ranged attacks (which require performing basic attacks to build up charges), a dodge roll, and perform a parry. The parry ability has just tight enough of a window to feel reasonably useful, but not completely abusable/spammable to the point of cheesing your way through by mashing, especially since many enemy attacks cannot be parried (usually colored in red and warned of with a quick sound) and may leave field hazards to make moving around more difficult. Manoeuvring and timing are the name of the game here.
Performing certain specific actions (e.g. parries of specific attacks) can expose enemies’ “destruction points”, where you have a brief window to hit them with an attack that does bonus damage and stuns them. Rather than building up a stun meter like you often see in the boss fights of many other games, this is usually more sensitive to context and timing. Doing this enough can also enable you to grapple hook to the boss for a chunky extra hit. Hitting enemies with ranged attacks or under specific conditions can also place an additional meter above the boss’s health bar (which fills via hitting them) that when filled allows Anita to absorb some lost health. These mechanics encourage more aggressive play, and I can confirm it’s a more rewarding and generally effective way to play the game.
You have a selection of “Expansion Modules” to unlock throughout your playthrough for equipment. Each of these requires a few skill points to allocate into your slots. You unlock skill points by completing challenges in boss fights or training courses, though you should unlock more than enough just by playing the game with a modest amount of effort. Most of these have some neat perk, though many have somewhat specific activation conditions or even slight drawbacks. One expansion module for example that I found engaging involved increasing my basic attack damage but which went on cooldown if I performed too many dodge rolls in a short-ish time period. While this has no real downside (the only opportunity cost being its slot), in practice it changed my playstyle somewhat by further encouraging aggression and making me consider my dodge rolls more carefully and learning attacks in a way that dodging didn’t require rolling.
There are not a lot of particularly unique mechanics to this game, but they feel pretty tight and cohesive in practice. The combat finds a good mix of encouraging you to learn how to parry enemies without making its system entirely about pure timing memorization. Enough was going on that kept me on my toes while rarely feeling overwhelmed.
Doing Battle
When it comes to the actual bosses, they’re pretty fun. The game’s mechanics and combat are tight enough as is, and bosses generally last just long enough to feel like a genuine battle without ever becoming an outright slog. As is common with boss rush games, expect to die a lot; it doesn’t take that many hits to kill you and they all have plenty of attacks with variations and somewhat erratic patterns that keep fights from ever getting too predictable. You get healing charges, but they are limited (with the cap going up every few boss clears) and they leave you briefly vulnerable to try to use any time you don’t have invulnerability frames.
All this said, NanoApostle is a game more about execution than ideas. While some bosses have fairly inventive mechanics (the fourth and sixth boss come to mind), they aren’t especially standout. Bosses are different enough from each other, but few of them offer particularly memorable or unique mechanics when compared to the variety you might see from other boss rush games. They were definitely fun to do through and through, but I seldom had a moment where I thought “Wow, that was really inventive.”
Length and Depth
NanoApostle is a short but sweet little game on the whole. The game has fewer bosses than you’d come to expect from a boss rush game and is fairly low on the gimmicks. While I didn’t find it to have many bosses that I can say truly stood out, none of them particularly annoyed me. If you want to make the game tougher for yourself, every boss has a series of objectives you can accomplish, such as beating them under a certain time or parrying a certain number of attacks. Most of these objectives make sense, although there are a few that just feel excessive such as “reach the 2nd phase of the boss three/six times”, which arguably encourages failure to an extent.
My playthrough ran me about 7 hours, factoring in all of the time spent dying to bosses as well as completing the game’s training courses. Said courses each have their own objectives and are really the only other form of playable content in the game outside of boss battles. These consist of little obstacle courses and smaller enemy gauntlets, which can be a fun little diversion if you try to aim for the par times. The bosses are tough enough to take plenty of tries, though I’d probably still call NanoApostle a bit easier than many other boss rush games given you aren’t as heavily punished for most of your mistakes as you might be in some other titles. I died quite a number of times but never took more than an hour to clear any of the bosses. It is worth noting however that the game does not provide difficulty options. Though I would have liked to see more options for players besides myself, I personally felt the game’s difficulty to be satisfactory enough. It’s not brutal, but you’ll still have to try.
If there was one big issue with NanoApostle for me, it’s that I just wish it had more to offer. There isn’t really a whole lot to do in the game, so while most of the fat is trimmed, it isn’t a particularly hearty meal in and of itself. I would have liked to see a bit more out of its mechanics, such as a less context-sensitive grappling hook function. The game is tight and fun enough to play and the bosses felt satisfying to learn and beat, but there aren’t enough “wow” moments for a game focused on boss battles, the aspect of gaming which historically is where many such moments come from. What you get is an experience with a rather high floor but only a modestly high ceiling.
Presentation
NanoApostle has a pretty nice visual style. The pixel art is both clean and functional in motion, meaning that it was easy enough to follow what was happening during combat the vast majority of the time, even during the quicker-paced sections. Some of this might be due to the game’s “computer world” aesthetic providing a lot of greys and browns to contrast with brighter colors, but it works in providing both visual consistency and clarity. There are also some portraits during regular cutscenes as well as some drawn stills for more key cutscenes and they look nice. Nothing mindblowing here, but nothing detrimental to the game either. I also didn’t encounter any situations that brought about any annoying lag outside of one attack.
The game’s music is handled by KUSHIH, a sound team formed in 2024 comprised of composers who worked on several game scores I’ve enjoyed in the past, particularly those of Rabi-Ribi and Tevi. The music of NanoApostle is quite solid. If anything, what kept me from enjoying the music more was the fact that the game’s sound design is a big part of the game. I paid more attention to sound cues to avoid attacks than the music playing in the background, and while I think the sound design in this game is very good, I didn’t take in the music as much as I often do in these games. Thankfully sound effects and music have separate volume sliders to set as you see fit.
Verdict
NanoApostle is the epitome of a “pretty good” game. Combat is fun, presentation is well handled, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. This is one of those games where it does almost everything it sets out to do well but doesn’t quite reach particularly highs at any point either. It sticks to doing what works but rarely gets aggressive with its ambition or does something to truly go off the rails, falling into few pitfalls but also not being as creative as I would hope for a boss rush game. Nonetheless, I had a fun time playing it from start to finish and can definitely give it a recommendation for people interested in a short but relatively dense little action game.
NANOAPOSTLE IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another indie game, you should check out our review of Blasphemous 2.
Many thanks go to PQube Games for a PC review code for NanoApostle
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
