Highlights
- The Labyrinth Sentinel in Remnant 2 is a boss that consists of giant glowing cubes.
- It's a unique boss but can become frustrating and requires rote memorization to win.
There are few things quite like a good boss fight. From Ornstein and Smough to Mother Brain to Sephiroth, they're a video game mainstay for a good reason. Given the sheer number of them, it's no surprise that boss fights come in all manner of weird and wonderful shapes and sizes. I've beaten up the Pope, destroyed Mecha-Hitler, and taken down whatever the hell the Vortex Queen was supposed to be.
In recent years, however, I've been playing a lot of Souls-like games, which certainly have their more outrageous bad guys but tend towards fallen, decaying knights or twisted monstrosities with all their limbs in the wrong places. I'm looking at you, Bloodborne, and your endless parade of nightmare fuel. I don't mean that as a criticism; far from it. I adore Bloodborne. It's just that when I came up against Remnant 2's Labyrinth Sentinel recently, I realized it had been a long time since a boss fight has made me say "Huh?" as opposed to "Eww!" or "Woah!".
The Labyrinth Sentinel is found in, as you may have guessed, the Labyrinth, a kind of inter-dimensional nexus linking Remnant 2's many worlds. Now, if you haven't played the game or seen this boss yet, banish whatever image "Labyrinth Sentinel" has conjured in your mind, because I promise this boss is not what you think it is. It sounds like a noble guardian, vigilant in its watch over a realm threatened by the evil Root. You might be picturing a knight in shining armour, or a being of pure energy, but you'd be wrong.
The Labyrinth Sentinel is a bunch of giant glowing cubes rolling around a maze. That's it. They don't seem particularly aggressive, following the same pattern regardless of where you stand, but if one rolls over you, you die instantly. They can fire some fairly slow-moving projectiles at you, but that really isn't the danger. You just need to avoid being squished.
To emerge victorious, you need to break all the glowing weak points on each of the cubes, which is easier said than done. There are a lot of cubes, to the point that there are very few places that are safe to stand in, and they can move surprisingly fast. Couple that with the holes in the floor, the fact that some of the cubes are suspended in midair, and how difficult some of the weak spots are to see, and you have a boss fight that feels like it was designed for chameleons. Unless your eyes can swivel independently of each other, you're in trouble.
There was a boss in the original Remnant From The Ashes that was two giant flying insects on either side of a bridge, and trying to keep track of both at the same time was an absolute nightmare. The Labyrinth Sentinel feels like that, but somehow even worse. Keeping track of where each cube is and whether you're on a safe bit of the floor, avoiding the various projectiles, and trying to hit the weak spots all at the same time genuinely gave me a headache.
Just to cap the weirdness off, once you make it past the boss itself, you get to have a conversation with a giant psychic eye. No one can accuse the developers at Gunfire Games of not following through, I suppose. They're always willing to throw out a curve ball or two (or five).
As for whether I like the Labyrinth Sentinel as a boss, it's interesting insofar as it's unique, but it's just a little too annoying to be truly engaging. The whole chameleon eye thing, coupled with the fact that rote memorization is really the only way to win (the cubes always follow the same path) kind of pulls the rug out from under the fight.
That's the final word then. I'll certainly remember you Labyrinth Sentinel, but I'm not sure I like you. I'll see you on my next playthrough.