Boss Design Studio: Broken Vessel

If it looks blocky, it's because transparency.

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Boss Design Studio, my roughly fortnightly essay series in which I overanalyze videogame bosses and tell you what I think about them.

In this post, I'm looking at Broken Vessel, herald of spookiness and guardian of the double jump ability. If I had to briefly summarize its bossfight, I'd say "unsettling." In fact, in my opinion, this is one of the most unsettling bossfights in the entire game.

Broken Vessel is found in the Ancient Basin. It's a desolate area, and the only one to have a color palette of predominantly grayscale (well, and orange). That actually fits its lore location pretty well, as it's |located between the palace of the Pale King, whose color scheme is white, and the Abyss, whose color scheme is black|, and it's been infected with the zombie plague (providing the orange), but I digress. 

Ancient Basin has hardly any plants (the most it has is grey roots and this sort of hanging black leaf stuff), and its animals are few and far between. Unlike most of the other areas, there are no NPCs (except the map-seller, who isn't native to the area), no bosses, and not even any of the more sentient bug enemies. Little Infected things called Lightseeds will sometimes jump out of walls and scurry off into other walls, but they don't even damage you.

Lightseed.

But yes. No NPCs, no bosses, nothing sentient or even humanoid... until you make it all the way to the back of the area, to a dead-end room blocked off by Infection and containing a single solitary corpse. Nothing in the room moves, until you go and inspect the wall of Infection blocking the way forward, and a gate slams shut behind you.

Then Lightseeds start pouring out of the walls, running across the room, and jumping into the corpse. Said corpse will slowly grow a blob of Infection out of its shattered head as more and more Lightseeds jump into it, until it finally reaches the size in the picture above. At which point it throws its head back and screams at you, and the bossfight begins.

Broken Vessel is one of those bosses that fight almost like a player. It hops around the arena, occasionally dashes to reposition, and has a sword that it attacks you with. Also, it's the same kind of creature as the Knight (your character), and one of its attacks is even similar to one of your special attacks.

Speaking of which. This boss's main attack is dashing across the arena, slashing with its sword, an attack that's eerily similar to one of the special attacks you can unlock (the aptly named Dash Slash). This dash attack has a pretty good telegraph, but it's also really fast once it starts.

The other purely sword-based attack is the one where Broken Vessel stands in place and waves its sword back and forth in an arc above it. Not much to say about this one, honestly. But notice how I said "purely sword-based"? That's because it has more attacks, but they both use the orange Infection fluid.

One of these is the one where it jumps into the air above you, then slams down, sending four blobs of Infection to either side. Through the floor, mind you; they go down first, and then curve back upward. For the other one, it sits in the middle of the arena, flailing its head back and forth and sending a lot of Infection blobs through the floor in random patterns.

Oh yeah, and it also continuously summons Infected Balloons, floating blobs of Infection that follow you around and try to kill you with contact damage. They die in one hit, but you do have to do that hit, and they can be distracting when you're trying to fight the boss.

To say the least, Broken Vessel's movement is... odd. It doesn't seem like a very mobile boss -- its normal movement is a slow shuffle -- but the jumps and dashes move quite fast, almost too fast. And this is probably because, it can be inferred, Broken Vessel isn't doing this fight itself; it's just a corpse, being puppeted around by the Infection. Which explains its immobility except when moving, and its speed when it does move.

The odd movement gives this boss a sort of uncanny valley feel. It switches between moving very fast and barely moving at all, which is not something that any other boss does. Oh, they'll stand in place between attacks and give you a bit of breathing room, but they stand in place; Broken Vessel just slumps over in a heap on the floor.

Broken Vessel's arena is a decent example of the Ancient Basin as a whole. At least, the architecture is; there's the greyscale stonework, the grey roots, and the weird black plants. The arena is also full of blobs and veins of Infection, and there's orange smoke in the air.

The arena, pre-battle. Note the sad corpse.

Broken Vessel uses the track "Broken Vessel" for its boss music. It opens with a slowly rising sort of rumbling/humming sound, before bursting into a strong four-beat rhythm played on some sort of string instrument (I think it's cellos, but I'm not sure) that persists throughout the song. There's a jingling part that sounds almost like an alarm, and then the main melody begins.

Oh yes, the main melody begins. The main melody in "Broken Vessel" is a creepy, de-syncopated, rearranged reprise of the game's title theme.

The entire track is backed with string instruments playing a repetitive four-note beat, taking over for where the percussion is supposed to be, overlaid with the jingling alarm bits. The constant, driving rhythm gives the music a feeling of constant tension, with basically no breaks to give you a mental respite from it. And then there's the melody, which is almost but not quite the title theme; it has all the right motifs, but they're in a different order and most of them have been syncopated or de-syncopated to fit this song's rhythm.

Which makes sense, if you think about it. Broken Vessel is the same species as the main character (in fact, |they're siblings|), but it's also long dead, and it's been reanimated by the zombie plague to try to kill the main character.

Also, one part of the song includes a harpsichord, and Christopher Larkin is the only composer I know of who can make a harpsichord sound scary.

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time for a palindrome and an NPC!