YMMV / Star of Providence

• Awesome Bosses: The game's bosses are among its most engaging aspects, with some particular standouts:
  • Chamberlord seems like a simple King Mook of the most basic Chamberheads, but it shoots big bullets that travel quickly and adds said Chamberheads to the fray.
  • Behemoth is a huge tank that fires large bullet spreads and fireballs as it moves around. Dodging the attacks that rendered this thing The Dreaded to less nimble opponents is quite exhilarating.
  • Devourer is an enormous sewer worm that chases you while shooting at you with eyes inside that mouth. Not much is better than destroying the eyes to lighten the boss's attacks, and the pinch mode against its core isn't bad either.
  • Starting from Relics of the Past, Reactor takes its seemingly humble bullet patterns and overlaps them to create a tough — yet surprisingly fair — challenge for its fight.
  • The Machine unleashes a variety of quick attacks when its true form is revealed. The fact that it puts up an entirely different fight when you play as Overlord or ???, and it survives the first two combatants regardless of gameplay outcome, makes it even more badass.
  • Monolith replaces the Machine as True Final Boss in Hard difficulty, and proves the combination of Null and the Power Eternal to be something whose strength is only rivalled by that of one other boss. It pulls stronger versions of every playable weapon out of the bag at random, and the struggle proves itself a personal and emotional one in the story.
  • For all intents and purposes, Database is ten bosses jumbled into one. Aside from its main phases and playback of the Machine's creation, it can summon three out of eight boss Mix-and-Match Critters that borrow existing bosses and bullets and utilize them in creative ways.
• Bizarro Episode: The concept of the secret floor Nowhere. The walls jumble around below the facility in the style of a Minus World, enemies of all kinds are scattered with some fused together, and a supercomputer deems you a danger to the environment's structural integrity — and the only foreshadowing of it all is irrelevant to the plot.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Soul Extractors and similar enemies fire bursts of black-and-red bullets that hit like trucks. They spawn several ghosts upon death, though those aren't as dangerous as their attacks while they're alive. The Engorged is by far the worst in this regard, firing many of these bullets with little cover in sight, and sometimes combining them with phasing railgun shots aimed at you in unusual ways.
  • Various other enemies beyond the seal in Hard Mode also shoot bullets that deal double damage.
  • Displacers periodically teleport to a location where there's no cover between you and them, and then fire a sweeping laser that covers a broad area. Eternal Displacers are even worse, firing two sweeping lasers that also spawn bullets where their lasers impact the walls.
  • Eternal Chamberheads have two attacks: their first is a straightforward shotgun burst of bullets that isn't too hard to deal with, but their second attack is one of the most overwhelming in the game — if you break line of sight with them for too long, they'll shoot out a radial burst of bullets that pass through walls and wrap around the screen, often causing you to get hit by bullets coming from unusual angles. Some rooms place a lot of cover between you and them, almost always forcing them to use this attack.
  • Bane Engines attempt to target you with a rapidly moving cross-hair that homes in on you. If the cross-hair passes over you, it triggers one of two attacks depending on if they have line of sight with you — either a rapid barrage of large bullets, or a chain of delayed explosions directly over your ship.
  • Destroyers have two attacks that complement each other nastily: a massive bullet barrage that is unavoidable without taking cover, and a radial blast of bullets focused on a cross-hair that tracks your ship, often forcing you to come out of cover. Fortunately, the rooms they're in are usually designed to give you ample cover against their bullet barrages.
  • Demons only have one attack, but it's uniquely devastating — they shoot a fire orb at you that, upon impacting a wall, "traces" along the wall while spawning fire bullets, often causing the entire room to get entrenched in fire coming from all directions.
  • Enigmancers draw from a massive pool of random attacks, some unique to them and not used by any other enemy in the game, making them completely unpredictable to fight. They are also extremely tanky, ensuring that they manage to get an attack off almost every time you encounter them.
• Difficulty Spike: Overlord is significantly harder than anything that would've come before them, having a boatload of health and throwing out more Bullet Hell than any other enemy you've fought in the game. There's a tendency for many inexperienced players to breeze through the earlier parts of the game before losing all their health to this boss. Though Relics of the Past nerfed them, moderately reducing the amount of bullets they output, they're still an incredibly difficult fight.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • The last sub-boss of Database has no attacks that can be intentionally aimed at you. This is due to it all being a Flashback.
  • As the Funny Moments subpage mentions, the Geomancer's page states that earth magic is known to be a solid investment. Certain reliquaries imply that Bloke the Dungeon Shopkeeper is or was the head of the magic school of geomancy.
  • The Omnimancer's Monster Compendium entry seems like a one-off Shout-Out to Avatar: The Last Airbender. But considering how Ordinator, head of the magic school of pyromancy, is acting after The Omniscient Council of Vagueness disbanded, it actually occurred in Monolith for real.
  • Out of all boss fights against members of The Omniscient Council of Vagueness, Special Offer is the only one not listed as a mage. This is because Bloke does not directly attack you, but the mech he pilots does.
  • It's said that a fish that reaches the top of a waterfall turns into an Ice Wyrm. The leaping Crazy Fish and the actual Ice Wyrm are red and blue respectively. Just like another Legendary Carp and its evolved form: Magikarp and Gyarados.
• Fridge Sadness:
  • After clearing Hard difficulty for the first time, you are able to play as D-13 in Normal difficulty, and for each respective difficulty setting, D-13's and Null's runs are mechanically identical. This means that D-13 in Normal Difficulty, should you go far enough without being able to enter Nowhere, will effectively beat their best friend to Power Eternal and become a similar Tragic Monster to what they fight in Hard difficulty.
  • The Sudden Death lethality renders you a One-Hit-Point Wonder. With it enabled, it is possible for your HP to be reduced to zero in the mirror practice fight against D-13. Imagine if D-13 accidentally killed Null this way while sparring with them. Unlike the D-13 Hard difficulty ending, that death would have been for nothing.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Under the right circumstances, the Second Wind upgrade is this. Imagine having just one HP left, having accumulated a lot of max HP and max ammo, and an effective weapon with just a few shots remaining. Then, you use this upgrade at the Sanctum upgrade terminal to fill up all your HP and ammo.
  • The Quickening upgrade causes you to (upon running out of HP for the first time on your run) revive with 5 HP and max HP, attack power increased by 20%, and one immediate instance of laser blasts in all cardinal and diagonal directions obliterating practically anything in their way. This greatly increases your survivability, and in Intense lethality, you essentially regain all your starting HP and then some. There is very good reason why it cannot be obtained in Sudden Death lethality.
  • Drills are already among the most powerful room-clearers in the game owing to their innate phasing and large hitbox, but with Homing, they'll seek out enemies with extremely fast turn-speed, allowing for even faster room-clear. Add Triple onto that, and rooms are completely trivialized. Even outside of room-clearing, they're no slouch against bosses.
  • Giving a Laser several keywords that multiply the amount of lasers generated can end up creating so many lasers on the screen that rooms are cleared instantly as soon as it's fired, as well as cause the game to lag. These have been given a Fan Nickname as "Satan Lasers."
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Voltcores send out six electric beams when they die which have a very short telegraph, giving you barely any time to react and get out of the way. Thankfully, they always come out in the same direction, but on hard mode, there's two directional variations that the beams can come out in.
  • Hermits attempt to keep their distance from you and and periodically spawn ghosts to distract you while harassing you from afar with bullets.
  • Imps are even worse. They behave like hermits, but what makes them a pain is their method of attack — they frequently attempt to spawn a delayed explosion on your position, and if you try to corner them, they teleport to a different part of the room. On hard mode, the explosion also creates a radial burst of projectiles if you thought they weren't bad enough before.
  • Reapers have an invulnerability period in-between their teleports, and can cover a surprising amount of the room with their projectile barrages.
  • In a similar vein to above, Defoes and Bishops are usually invincible and only open up very briefly to shoot at you.
  • Cryomancers create icicles directly above you and drop them on your head. A lot. Thankfully, Relics of the Past made them not so bad by giving their icicles an indicator before they're spawned.
  • Geomancers create blocks from seemingly any direction cardinal to you and attempt to crush you by flinging them at you at high speed. The blocks also explode into bullets after they hit the wall for good measure.
• Tear Jerker: The D-13 Hard-difficulty ending of the game, which doubles as the finale of Monolith's canon timeline. D-13 has to fight Null with the latter overtaken by Power Eternal. Both battle themes possess melancholic tones to them, and once D-13 wins, the death squeal and flash that typically occurs once the Player Character dies occur, and Monolith breaks apart with a dying and falling Null revealed. D-13 then destroys the conduit to prevent the same things that happened to them and Null from occurring ever again, and the last shot of the end credits depicts D-13, stricken with grief, floating to the ground in front of Null's destroyed body.
  • The secret cutscene obtained by defeating Monolith with all S-ranks takes this further, with nothing but dialogue of a past memory ending with present-day D-13's somber "Goodbye Null", coming to terms with the fact that thanks to the two ships seeking out the facility's power, D-13 was eventually forced to kill their best friend.
• That One Attack:
  • Guardian can summon ghost knights with drills that fly quickly across the screen, which can easily catch attack-focused players off guard.
  • Ordinator can summon living blocks that shoot unpredictable patterns of bullets at you. Although the boss's other first-phase attacks are simpler to avoid, once this attack ends, the blocks turn into Blazing Skullies.
  • One of the worst attacks that the Machine pre-Null can use is multiple barrages of yellow laser blasts that spew slow-moving blue-black bullets around. You'll have to weave through the little bullets before the next laser blasts span much of the screen.
  • Abyssal, a sub-boss of Database, can teleport away and leave the Devourer mouth to launch laser blasts and blood projectiles around. You can avoid the lasers by moving to the side of the screen, as well as put your full focus into protecting yourself if you have a sword, but the problem is that this inversion of the Tactical Suicide Boss drags out the fight.
  • Iron Magus, another sub-boss, wields a flail that targets your distance from them when it is swung... while lauching flame bursts at you simultaneously. The flail can easily hit you multiple times if you don't dodge it well enough. The sub-boss can also summon ghost knights that are Wreathed in Flames that let them leave behind fiery trails, a short-range burst upon entering the arena, and many perpendicular bullets.
  • Both of Chaosgod's scripted attacks where it moves to the background are brutal, the second one more so. The first one has it bombarding the entire screen with several waves of telegraphed explosions, requiring you to maneuver into small spots to dodge them. While figuring out how to dodge this attack isn't too hard with experience, the second attack is tougher even after you know what's coming — the attack involves Chaosgod blowing up the stars in the background, causing a lengthy shower of powerful bullets to fall over the entire screen, the larger ones continuously targeting you throughout. Hope you've saved a couple of bombs for this attack.
• That One Boss:
  • Fish. Yes, you heard that right, Fish. Fish's watery arena screws with your movement and dash timing, often causing you to get hit, and the smaller fish and blastcores that spawn often wall you in to get hit by its bullets, not helped by the fact that they aren't destroyed by bombs.
  • Firewall has a reputation for being by far the hardest boss to encounter on the Bellows, with almost all of its attacks assaulting you with fire from itself as well the walls next to you. Thankfully, the After The End patch toned it down a bit, though it's still a pain to fight.
  • Reactor was a Breather Boss when the game first launched, with its attacks being fairly straightforward to dodge for how late you fight it. However, Relics of the Past buffed it immensely, making its attacks frequently overlap each other, which results in you having to essentially dodge twice the amount of attacks as you used to.
  • Microcore has a plethora of different complex attacks it can use four of should you challenge it, and the damage you take from it can very well outweigh anything that's not from a full reward bar, rendering it more dangerous to fight than Trespasser and most main floor bosses. The friendly Skully might have a point in "[letting] sleeping cores be".
• Underused Game Mechanic: Winds that strongly move the ship in one direction only appear in two places in the game: in the part of the tutorial where you are taught to dash, and when Database sub-boss Abyssal tries to suck you into the Devourer mouth.

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