En Garde!
It's really fun. Plot sucks, but I'll come back to that. Swashbuckler action-adventure game that I think was made for the Switch. It's a bloodless, cartoony thing. The art style (the kind of cartoony where everything feels like plasticky/bright, pops) is nice. There's surprisingly few pirate games (although really, people dont' give a shit about ANYTHING but science fiction and fantasy trash, even crime games hardly exist anymore since GTA clones all went out of business), or other rapier/Zorro-like stuff. The gameplay is mostly the same shit you'd see anywhere else, but the gimmick is basically having a very sassy fighting style based around environmental manipulation.
It actually reminds me a lot of Superhot in that your enemies aren't much more fragile than you, and it's just your ability to fight dirty that gives you a particular advantage. Most of them can't be beaten around with a sword, they have to be parried and riposted to be hurt (in a legit swordfight), but they mob you. There's no "mook chivalry," they don't fuck around, if you have six people they will all be spamming attacks on you constantly. It's possible to fight that fairly, but you're not going to because it's actually very difficult. Instead, like Superhot, it's about how you maneuver around. So in this case that means swinging off of ropes, jumping from above, throwing shit at them that you pick up (you can put buckets over their heads), kicking furniture into them, and so on.
I really like it thematically. In a sense, all of the fighting comes down (since your enemies are smart enough to actually fight like they want to survive) to doing some cheeky bullshit that startles them and exploiting that split second of confusion to knock them into a wall or down a flight of stairs. And there's lots of subtle little differences between the ways you do that.
Plot is dreary. It's one of those cartoony games that thought it didn't need to put an effort, although plenty of bingbingwahoo has more effort than this. You're sassy female Zorro (she's annoying) in Spexico. Vague swashbuckler land that is Spain, Mexico or the Caribbean depending on whatever it wants to be at the moment. The setting is nice, I just wish it had an actual story. Even the tiniest bit of setup or character.
I hope they make another, but I doubt they will.
