NanoApostle Review

NanoApostle is a boss rush Souls-like from the developer 18Light Game and publisher PQube. It's a Sci-Fi, top-down, parry-based action game that cuts right to the chase by giving you challenging boss fight after the boss fight. In a scene of Souls games where, you could spend, say, half of the length is spent on exploring your way to the next boss or running back to them once you die, NanoApostle forgoes that aspect to present an experience that is more respectful of your time.

So, what sort of game is NanoApostle? The narrative is set in a period of war, and you play Anita, a girl who awakens in a research facility. Your powers, which help you during your fights, come from a nanomechanical entity, the Apostle, which is implanted into you.

Anita is treated as if she is a science experiment, and she is tasked to fight several bioweapon prototypes. This is justified by the war setting. Supposedly, she is being nurtured into a deadly weapon to grant the edge needed to win the war. NanoApostle starts with well-made, hand-drawn cutscenes, and little bits of context are given out gradually as you complete the game—and it never feels out of place.

Despite the dismal premise, Anita is quite naïve and childlike, often wondering why she is being put through such tests. She is quite endearing, which leads me to sympathize with her. This presents itself as an interesting juxtaposition to think about while playing through NanoApostle.

You have an AI companion called Wenny who gives you advice and upgrades and offers banter. She finds herself in a similar situation—her mind synchronized with the computers in the facility after she was brought in for being gravely injured, so she's just as stuck as you are.

Whenever I play a souls game or a souls-like, I try to get to the bosses as fast as possible. While I know this video game genre is only appealing because of the challenge, I often feel like the mobs and enemies you come across before you run into a boss are not worth my time.

I end up feeling this way because once I die to the boss of that area, I will just run past them, trying to get back to that boss as soon as possible while the moves are fresh in my memory.

With how long runs back to bosses in souls-likes tend to be, they can feel like a waste of time. With that in mind, NanoApostle respects that sort of sentiment by throwing bosses at you with almost no introduction! However, this approach is perhaps a little too mindful of that because the game is only 5-10 hours long, depending on how good you are at the game.

In the gameplay, you enter these training grounds and are fed boss fights akin to what boss rush titles are usually like—you get bosses, and then you get even more bosses. The presentation and gameplay are similar to Titan Souls. You have your hacks and your slashes to attack the bosses. You have a way to parry certain attacks, the ability to dodge, and a way to shoot projectile attacks.

Your tools are simple, but there is a surprising amount of depth to how you can use these abilities. To succeed in each boss fight, you must be very familiar with the boss's moves and weaknesses. You can't just spam your basic attack—you will need to put some thought behind what you do.

The boss battles here are tough. I think Nine Sols is up there in terms of difficulty, and NanoApostle comes close. You must use your parry to deflect projectiles or stagger the bosses to take off chunks of their HP because your attacks don't do much damage outside of those damage windows you must create.

A destruction point is revealed once you attack the enemy enough times. At this point, you can use your projectile attack to stun enemies. Anita's energy bar also fills up as you do this. Once it is full, she can target that destruction zone and infect the enemy. This causes a diamond to appear on top of the enemy, which fills up as you attack.

When you fill-up that bar, a state called absorb is triggered, which will stun the enemy, at which point you will be able to use your grapple hook to pull yourself in and deal massive damage while the enemy is down. The gameplay can feel similar to Hades when you get down to the movement, attacking, and the boss fights, but certain mechanics of NanoApostle set it apart from even that.

One of the challenges, other than trying to survive the barrage of attacks from the bosses, is trying to make your hits land. The game requires you to be precise; even a small mistake can kill you.

Thankfully, the game is forgiving in letting you get right back into the fights. It even rewards you with skill points when you reach certain objectives during the fight, even if you don't kill the boss, and that is what I like about this game—it really does respect your time.

Being a boss with a rush title, the bosses need to be good for that, where most of the runtime will be spent. Fortunately, NanoApostle keeps its end of the bargain and offers interesting bosses. The bosses are unforgiving, yes, but never unfair. Your failures come down to whether you can figure out a way to counter or evade the enemy's attacks.

There are bosses with more than one phase and a lot of variety to the bosses in NanoApostle. Some attacks turn the arena into bullet hells, where you must find a gap to stay in or an object to stand behind. There is also a fight where the arena is dark, so you must rely a bit more on your reflexes. The fights feel unfair at first, but then you feel like a badass once you figure out how to deal with them.

There are also little platforming sections between the boss fights—they are very short, so NanoApostle can still keep its "Boss Rush" title. You have things like little enemies to deal with and turrets that can be destroyed by parrying their projectiles.

Once again outside of the boss fights, you also have skill points outside the boss battles to spend. You can get skills to make Anita play in a way that caters to your taste. However, the skills work a little differently than you would expect.

Some of the skills have a positive and a negative element to them. You could, for example, take a skill that increases your damage output, but you receive less health when you heal yourself in return for that. You can also experiment, as you can reallocate your skill points whenever you want.

The visuals in NanoApostle are presented in an anime-style pixel art style. The characters are cute, and the war setting with the soldiers in the cutscenes adds another point of contrast to the game. The colors are appropriately quite dark, damp, and monotonous. I've always liked pixel art styles. To add yet another point of contrast to the cuteness, when you defeat a boss, Anita performs a gruesome execution that rips the boss apart into pieces. It's gory, it’s disgusting, and I love it.

The soundtrack here is quite good. Slow bits have piano while the music ramps up during the boss fights with the synth stuff. The sound effects here are a highlight. The feedback you get from landing hits, getting hits, and everything else is quite satisfying in NanoApostle.

While NanoApostle might not be a must-play for everyone, it deserves at least a solid recommendation for players who want a succinct, soulslike package; its short runtime is full of challenging and rewarding boss fights. Plus, I think it would be a great game to take around on the Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch. If the urge hits for a streamlined, no-frills action game, NanoApostle is worth checking out because it is a fantastic boss rush title.