Boss Design Studio: Uumuu

White backgrounds and transparent white do not mix.

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 Uumuu, a bit of an odd duck among Hollow Knight's bosses. If I had to briefly summarize its bossfight, I'd say "simple."

Uumuu is located in the Teacher's Archives, a building in the middle of Fog Canyon (the area full of acid and jellyfish). The Teacher's Archives houses one of the three seals you need to break before fighting the final boss, and that seal is guarded by none other than Uumuu.

When you enter the central room of the Archives and get far down enough to see it, Uumuu rises from the water. And from that point onward, it proceeds to do exactly two things, both of which involve lightning, while floating semi-randomly around the arena.

(I say semi-randomly because it seems to sort of target you, but it's really slow, so you'll often be long gone from where it's trying to go by the time it arrives.)

Uumuu's first attack is to simply fill the arena with bursts of lightning, specifically above the platforms (we'll get to those). These do have a brief telegraph, and they don't cover the entire arena, so you can dodge them. There are actually two versions of the attack, which are mirrored from each other, but they aren't that different.

And the other attack is continuously spawning lightning on you. To avoid this attack, you have to constantly keep moving, which can be a bit tricky because it's not difficult to accidentally get yourself cornered.

But those are Uumuu's only two attacks. It's not very complicated. And this would seem like a really easy bossfight. It's slow, it's large, it only has two attacks and both of them are telegraphed... what's the catch?

As it happens, the catch is that Uumuu is entirely invulnerable. You see that outer membrane it has? Your sword strikes, magic attacks, summoned minions, or whatever else will just bounce off that. You can't hurt Uumuu.

But Quirrel can.

Not a professor.

Okay, a bit of background. Quirrel is an NPC who shows up in random places around Hallownest and makes pleasant conversation with you. He carries a sword, but he doesn't ever really use it. When you approach the Teacher's Archives for the first time, Quirrel is standing outside the building.

After a brief segment of just you and Uumuu, presumably so you can figure out "hey wait a second, this thing is invulnerable," Quirrel flash-steps in with a battle cry. Throughout the fight, he darts around the arena yelling things, with the same teleporting-by-going-very-fast as the Mantis Lords have. And after every few Uumuu attacks, he takes down the boss's impenetrable outer membrane, allowing you to do some damage before it re-invincibles itself again.

Uumuu, vulnerable to stabbing.

(Brief note about two of Quirrel's battle cries: The initial one has the same "word" as one of Hornet's battle cries, and also her challenge in Silksong. Also, one of the randomly-yelled-throughout-the-battle ones sounds oddly like "tecum", which is Latin for "with you"; I don't know if that's intentional, but it's still a neat tidbit.)

For a Hollow Knight boss, Uumuu is oddly simple. Unlike most of the other bosses, which have complicated internal logic and behavior, it really... doesn't. It just drifts around attacking in uncomplicated ways, filling the arena with lightning and/or trying to hit you with said lightning, until you die. Honestly, and I hesitate to say this, it reminds me of my early forays into boss-making: randomly select between a couple of attacks, wander around the arena, repeat until the player dies.

Which is actually perfect for its in-game function. You see, in-lore, Uumuu is heavily implied to be an artificial creation, built specifically to guard the interior of the Teacher's Archives. So as a pseudo-intelligent construct, it doesn't need to act like an intelligent foe; its modus operandi of "fly around being invulnerable and throwing lightning at intruders until they die" suits it well. In-universe, the bugs are designing a guardian for the Teacher's Archives, and this is what they came up with.

All right, the arena. Uumuu's arena matches the rest of the Teacher's Archives: everything is made of bronze, there are tubes of acid in the background, and of course we mustn't forget the smaller jellyfish in the background. As a whole, the Teacher's Archives have a very "Victorian mad science" aesthetic, and the arena is no exception.

It's also one of the first boss arenas that are bigger than the screen. For this I am very grateful, because Uumuu is much to big to be trapped in a small space with; if the arena was any smaller, the main threat wouldn't be the boss's attacks, it would be the boss accidentally bumping into you.

The half-submerged lightning jellyfish is in fact Uumuu.

This boss doesn't have a dedicated song. It uses "Decisive Battle", which I previously discussed in the Gruz Mother and Vengefly King post. To recap what I said there, it's a solid but slightly generic boss theme, which befits its status as the "this boss needed music but it doesn't have a specific song" track.

This has been Boss Design Studio. Tune in next time for six bosses at once.