Origin: Brutal Orchestra

Appearance: A colossal purple snake coming out of the water, Ouroboros is a challenging boss inside the Purgatory of Brutal Orchestra. While its size can be intimidating, the most disturbing detail about its design is surely the too-much human face. Or better, the human anatomy of ONE of fhe faces. In fact, Ouroboros has two faces piled up on each other, one with human attributes, more serious and less intimidating, while the lower one is a grotesque anatomy mainly composed of teeth. The human anatomy on a sea creature always creates an uncanny being, and the Ouroboros is not an exception. In battle, the Ouroboros is composed by three parts: the grotesque head, part of the body coming out of the water, and the tail at the end. Once a body part is destroyed, it will come back as half-broken and devoured.

Background: The Ouroboros is one of the possible bosses of the second biome, the Orpheum. The battle against the colossal serpent is long and challenging, involving meticulous positioning, and the necessity to break down a huge health pool. While the body can also attack, the head is the damage dealer to absolutely avoid. In fact, every few turns, the head will use the Starvation attack causing an insane amount of damage to the character in front of it. However, if nobody is in that position, the missing attack will weaken the creature, now starving from hunger. And if avoiding that position looks easy on paper, the other body parts, especially the tail, can push all the characters one position toward the deadly maw. Moreover, if a three-target boss with high HPs and an almost instant killing attack is not challenging enough, the “killed” body parts come back as rotten flesh able to heal the creature.

The Ouroboros is based on the snake with the same name, a representation of the time cyclicity by eating its own tail. Just in Brutal Orchestra, the self-eating goes even more literally. According to the official Wiki, the Ouroboros was once worshipped by a cult, who believed that, with enough sacrifices, the human face would have finally spoken a mysterious truth. Interestingly, this is not the first game where the Ouroboros appears with this disturbing design. In Swallow the Sea, from the same developers ItsTheTalia, the grotesque fish-human hybrid is called Orro. The two games are somehow connected, this is because Brutal Orchestra is set in a huge purgatory where the creatures that died in other games, including the Orro, spend the eternity or reborn there.

I contacted Talia Bob Mair, one of the developers, to learn something more about the Ouroboros, and they were kind enough to reply with some information about the design, lore, and even secrets behind the Ouroboros. They even provided an interesting concept image of the Orro from Swallow the Sea. So I will leave now space for the words of the dev:

The Ouroboros / Orro is a strange creature, as she is really the product of a long running trend in my artwork of adding humanoid features to fish. The double face element of the Ouroboros/ Orro actually was inspired by the Manga Berserk and its habit of it’s apostle monsters featuring two faces, a monstrous face and a human one. The Orro originally had brown skin [Image below] with purple innards as both the face and skin tone were taken from Angad Matharoo (my co-developer on Perfect Vermin). A fun fact is that Pearl, a party member in Brutal Orchestra’s design, is actually a scrapped design for the Ouroboros’ head in Swallow the Sea. Speaking of Brutal Orchestra, the Orro shows up in that game as the Ouroboros, this was done to try and translate some of the immense amount of Swallow the Sea players to Brutal Orchestra but also because we have fallen too deeply in love with the face whale to let her go. I don’t think she will show up in another game for a while but you will likely see her again someday.

As a bonus fun fact I will reveal something strange I did while making Swallow the Sea that has previously been kept secret. Every rock in Swallow the Sea was placed by hand as our procedural attempts were lackluster. This meant for almost 2 weeks all I did was place every rock in the game. For some reason I decided to make one of these blocks shaped like male genitalia and began hiding it throughout the game. There are roughly 300 instances of this cock-rock in the game and no one has ever noticed it.