As Silksong drags them into the spotlight again, have boss runbacks had their day?

Hello and welcome to the first in an almost certainly occassional series of features we’re tentatively calling The Big Question, in which, having failed to reach a decisive position on something we’ve been having fun chattering about in the office this week, we present it to you, the EG community, for further interrogation.

Let me paint a picture: Vlor, Despoiler of the Night, raises his mighty fists toward the blackening sky, thick swells of crackling magic signalling an incoming downpour of vicious spears from dimensions unknown. Sword aloft, you rush in, seizing this rare moment of vulnerability to chip, chip away at Vlor’s health bar. Only – your timing is off; your dodge is too slow, and before you know it, you’ve gurgled another death cry, respawning a potentially tortuous five-minute odyssey away from Vlor’s Palace of Desolate Ruin and another chance to best him.

Yes, I’m talking about the classic boss runback – distant cousin, perhaps, to the unskippable pre-boss cutscene – and one of the most divisive mechanics to have been embraced by developers inspired by FromSoftware’s Souls games. For a time, if you’d asked, I probably would have evangelised the runback; if there’s one thing I’ve learned battling through From’s oeuvre, it’s that calmness isn’t just a virtue, it’s a necessity. Anger breeds impatience, impatience breeds carelessness, and suddenly you’ve got two dozen gigantic spears sticking out the top of your head at concerning angles.

My old argument, then, was that runbacks were a vital opportunity for re-centring – a chance to breathe out the rage as you traversed a familiar path, ready to face your formidable opponent again with perfect mental equilibrium. By Dark Souls 3, though, the series’ boss runbacks were growing notably less severe, and by the time Elden Ring arrived – let’s ignore Raya Lucaria – it seemed From was about ready to consign them to the dustbin of video game history once and for all, tossed aside as a pointless bit of legacy faff. And you know what? I didn’t miss them.

But as other developers began looking to capitalise on From games’ popularity, runbacks – alongside other familiar Soulsian mechanics like world-resetting rest points and currency drops on death – started proliferating elsewhere. Over the years, we’ve seen the subgenre embraced by the likes of Nioh, Salt & Sanctuary, Lords of the Fallen, Mortal Shell, Blasphemous, Steel Rising, Nine Sols, and Lies of P; the full list is long. And while some studios opted to ape the formula as closely as possible for maximum authenticity, others, particularly in recent years, either jettisoned runbacks entirely or shortened them so much they felt little more than an obligatory nod. For a time, it seemed runbacks might finally be falling out of fashion, but then came Hollow Knight: Silksong. With its punishing difficulty and often lengthy runbacks, Silksong has helped resurrect the conversation once more: do boss runbacks really serve a purpose or are they just an archaic, infuriating bit of time-wasting design that’s well past its prime?

On Silksong specifically, Eurogamer’s Dom Peppiatt – a massive fan of the original Hollow Knight – is torn. “On the one hand,” they explain, “I really appreciate what Team Cherry has done in making them dynamic: you cannot just autopilot your way back to the boss in most cases, because the path is laid out with threats that do not react the same every single time. Enemies may back-dash, hurl projectiles that intercept your jumps, or burrow up/down through the terrain. It means you have to think, react, and be aware every single time you die – you can’t just sleepwalk your way back to an encounter like you do in some FromSoft games, even the runback is a test. That’s fun. It wakes you up, it makes you think about your path.”

So from a design perspective, Silksong gets a tentative thumbs-up, but from a player perspective, Dom is much less convinced. “I dislike it,” they continue. “It reminds me most of the runbacks in Dark Souls 2, often messy, needlessly long, and interruptive to the overall flow of the experience. I like a runback: I think it’s a good way to tutorialise players and have them (very quickly) learn the nuances of your game, but Silksong errs on the side of sadistic for me. I’d rather the mean-spirited aspects of the game be kept to the boss encounters and dedicated puzzle areas; having it seep into the connective tissue is just a bit too aggravating.”

I also posed the same question to Eurogamer’s Ed Nightingale, a man so firmly embedded in From’s glorious worlds at this point, it’s a wonder he hasn’t morphed into a mossy castle. “I’m not totally averse to runbacks,” Ed tells me. “I’ve played enough Souls games to appreciate how repetition becomes muscle memory and, thus, mastery. Heck, Demon’s Souls is almost entirely runbacks as entire levels must be completed before a boss battle. But even FromSoftware has slowly phased these out, with Elden Ring not only being generous with Sites of Grace but adding Stakes of Marika outside of boss doors too. By comparison, Silksong’s runbacks feel archaic, especially with its Sonic-levels of infuriating enemy placement.”

“I don’t mind dying repeatedly to a boss,” Ed adds from the comfort of his favourite poison swamp. “I do mind dying repeatedly against a tiny floating critter who I should be able to get past with ease, but flutters irritatingly just out of reach. Where’s my fly swat?!”

But what does a newcomer to Soulslikes have to say about all this? Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese has been braving Silksong with only limited experience of these kinds of games, and is not, it transpires, having an entirely good time. “It’s such a fine line, isn’t it?,” he says. “I was very fed up the other evening while attempting a speculative blind jump into an abyss. I couldn’t land it – I’m not even sure I was supposed to land it – but I kept trying, over and over, and each time involved a lengthy runback. And I got bored, and at that moment, I cursed the game’s design.” But amid that mounting fury, a memory triggered for Bertie, harking back to his time playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

“There, I’ve been doing runbacks for years,” he explains. “Even in a more sanitised experience like World of Warcraft, you have to run back to your corpse if your team dies in a dungeon, and try and resurrect everyone, which can be incredibly dangerous depending on where you die. But in older MMOs, where dungeons weren’t instanced and all the enemies respawned – effectively closing the route behind you – it meant someone, usually a healer, would have the perilous task of trying to get back there if you died. Or your entire group would have to redo all your progress in the dungeon and reclear the path if you wanted to try the boss again. And isn’t that, essentially, the same thing?” It’s a reminder that runbacks have a legacy far beyond Soulslikes; and considering the ongoing popularity of roguelikes, in which the concept of the runback is arguably stretched to its extreme, it’s perhaps a sign they’ll continue to endure.

So that’s us, then; firmly and unhelpfully straddled on either side of the fence of consensus. So we ask, is the boss runback an outdated bit of game design that should be consigned to the past, or is there still value in those lengthy returns? Over, as they say, to you.