How to-and how NOT to-Make a Roguelike Final Boss

Many years ago, a good friend of mine named Will bought myself and our friend Cam a roguelike game called Risk of Rain. In this game, you take on the role of a spaceship crash survivor on the mysterious planet of Petrichor V, travelling through its various environs and battling the flora and fauna as you attempt to escape the planet. It quickly became the go-to game for my friends and I to play together, and we spent many an hour fighting our way across the two dimensional alien landscape. All of this only became more intense when Hopoo Games, in their infinite wisdom, released a sequel: Risk of Rain 2. Taking Petrichor V from 2D to 3D, I have put over 280 hours into this game, marking it as the most tracked hours I’ve put into any non MMO game ever (No one look at how many hours I’ve put into Runescape, we’re not talking about that right now). Suffice to say, I have a deep, deep love of Roguelike games.

A quick overview for the uninitiated: The term roguelike stems from the classic 1980 video game Rogue, known for its usage of permadeath and procedurally generated level design. Essentially, every run of the game Rogue was going to be unique, as opposed to a game like Megaman where the stages are always the same every time. Nowadays, Roguelikes are a massively popular genre with a few common characteristics

1. Procedurally generated level design: no run will ever be exactly the same as the run before, even as you aim for the same goal.
2. Permadeath: running out of lives during a run will end the run completely, leaving the player to restart.
3. Meta-progression: While not necessary, and technically deviating from the structure set out by Rogue, many roguelike games today have some type of Meta-progression, or progression outside of the run itself. Whether it’s unlocking new characters and cards in Slay the Spire, or strengthening Zagreus through the Mirror of Night in Hades, these games make it so that with every run, you increase your chances of success in the next go around.
4. Endless: Theoretically, you can continue to do runs of a roguelike game endlessly, with many of them adding in mechanics to increase the difficulty by adding different challenges. These are not games you beat once and put down, but instead games that you try to beat again and again and again.

Now that we understand what a Roguelike game is, we can get to the actual point of this article. In a roguelike, you will typically end the run by fighting a final boss. Whether it’s Hades (Hades), the Heart of the Spire (Slay the Spire), the Rebel Flagship (FTL: Faster than Light), or Providence (Risk of Rain), this is the culmination of your efforts in the run: can you beat this final adversary. Unlike more narrative games such as Persona 5 or Elden Ring where you fight the final boss once to beat the game, this is a final boss that you’ll likely end up fighting a lot as you continue to play runs of the game. They need to be fun, engaging, and exciting to battle over and over and over again. Creating such a boss is a difficult task of game design, and no game better exemplifies how both to succeed and fail at this task than Risk of Rain 2.

When Risk of Rain 2 first released in early access, it had no final boss. Instead, you looped through eight stages, the difficulty increasing as time went by. Upon completing the eight stage you were given the option to proceed to the stage “A Moment, Fractured” where you could obliterate at a strange monolith, ending your run and “winning” the game. It was not until the full release of the game that we could travel to the moon of Petrichor V and battle the mysterious Mithrix, the elder brother of Risk of Rain’s final boss, Providence. We were incredibly excited to finally see who would be at the end of our long, arduous battle through the alien wastes, only to discover that fighting Mithrix…kinda sucked.

To understand why Mithrix sucked, you have to understand what playing Risk of Rain 2 really entails. You spend the game navigating multiple stages, killing hordes of enemies for gold so that you can get items and increase your strength. At the end of each stage, you trigger a teleporter event, summoning a boss enemy to fight, as well as many smaller enemies. The game, and the items within it, are primarily built around fighting a multitude of enemies at once, with many item effects increasing in strength as they chain from enemy to enemy. You focus on building what are known as proc chains, creating systems in which items trigger the effects of other items, until you become a whirling ball of sticky bombs, razor wire, ukelele’s, and death. 

It is a game built on thriving in what some might call a target rich environment. Which made it all the more disappointing when the final boss was just…one guy. A four phase boss fight, only one of these phases (phase 2) involved fighting multiple enemies, and Mithrix isn’t even there for that part! All of those fancy proc chains and on death effects were suddenly useless, and you had to quickly figure out if your build was even capable of doing high single target damage. On its own that would be frustrating enough, but then in the fourth phase of the fight, Mithrix just yoinks all of your items and even uses them against you, with the only way to get them back being dealing damage to him. It’s an interesting mechanic, and I do enjoy the creativity of it, but in execution it’s just kind of irritating. 

Is it the worst boss fight I’ve ever done? No, absolutely not. I played Shadow of Mordor after all, and they made the final boss a series of quick time events. I still haven’t forgiven them for that. But at least I only had to do that once, and then I had beaten the game. I was supposed to fight Mithrix every time I wanted to truly win my Risk of Rain 2 run, and I have gone on many a Risk of Rain 2 run. Suddenly you had to completely change how you developed your build if you wanted to beat him, either hoping RNJesus would bless you with a perfect Mithrix killing item set, or just looping enough times so that you became more broken than Brawl era Meta Knight. Sure people found methods to cheese Mithrix regardless of build, but all I wanted was to have a fun fight. Instead, I got an angry moon man who didn’t want to play by the rules of the game I loved.

Risk of Rain 2 would go on to add two more final bosses over the next few years, both of whom were…equally as frustrating really. Both the Voidling and the False Son fell into the same trap: Spend the whole game fighting hordes, now fight one entity. Forget your proc chains and fancy builds, and just shoot this same enemy for a really long time, while endlessly dodging its attacks that will likely either 1 shot or 2 shot you. They both looked really cool, but the fights…not so much. But then, everything changed in 2025 with the release of the dlc The Alloyed Collective.

The Alloyed Collective introduced two new final bosses, The Solus Wing and The Solus Heart. It was only through defeating the Solus Wing, a massive technological marvel, that one could access the Solus Heart, the core of a digital hivemind network that sought to assimilate everything in its path. Once again, they were beautiful to look at, but now, fighting them was actually fun! The change wasn’t even particularly complicated: they just added more targets in the fight. 

The Solus Wing had four individual weak points on its frame that could each be targeted separately from its main body, allowing all of those fancy chain attacks to work again! In addition, its projectiles counted as enemies for the purpose of chaining attacks and on death effects. All of a sudden, the same build that could wipe out a host of Lemurians, Imps, Jellyfish, and a Clay Dunestrider actually worked against the boss! The Solus Heart continued this trend, with its various projectiles helping to trigger all of the on-kill effects you had spent so much time developing! It was beautiful! Add that to some great stage design, well telegraphed attacks, and some unique boss mechanics, and suddenly Risk of Rain 2 had a really fun, well integrated final boss option that I looked forward to fighting on my runs. It just took them realizing that it’s a lot more fun when the final boss plays by the same rules as the rest of the game.

Life outside of games is a complicated mess, and I’ve learned many times that just when you think you know the rules of the world, everything gets thrown on its head and you have to start over from square zero. You spend all this time being told that if you go to school, follow the rules, and do all these little things right, you’ll make it in life with a house and 2.4 children. Next thing you know, owning a house costs the life of your firstborn child, you’re at war with Iran, and the entertainment industry is determined to put a hatchet in its own brain. Life isn’t following the rules I thought it was meant to, but I would at least like my boss fights to, y’know?