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Do you ever feel the need to go to video games as a whole and say “Hey, are you doing alright?” Was I the only one who watched the announcement trailer for Mortal Kombat 1 and all the people getting hyperrealistically spread across the landscape like jam on toast and said “Do you need to talk to someone, Mortal Kombat 1? Is everything okay at home?” “SHUT UP. DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND I HAVE TO BE REAL. MORE REALISTIC GORE ALWAYS ALWAYS OR THEY WON’T TAKE ME SERIOUSLY!” I’d say it’s the way you just split that dude in half from the nostrils down that makes you hard to take seriously. Oh, video games, what happened to that cheeky fun loving scoundrel who would let me while away the hours playing We Love Katamari without letting me know I forgot to free up space on the memory card? “FUN? WHO’S GOT TIME FOR FUN WITH ALL THE COSMETICS YOU NEED TO GRIND FOR?”
Perhaps this explains why I was so drawn to En Garde! this week, an indie swashbuckling simulator with much of the PS2 era about it and which is, controversially, fun. In a Spanish-accented setting about one part Zorro to one part Three Musketeers we play as – subtly brings up the Steam page in the other window – Adalia de Volador, a Robin Hood-like sword-wielding noblewoman who foils the sinister plans of the moustache-twirling Count-Duke, a villain so evil he couldn’t even decide what stereotypically evil title to give himself.
So tonewise I’d say we’re about adjacent to the Gummi Bears animated series, and that’s before you see the bouncy, flamboyant animations, the bright colour scheme, and with the enemies continuing to exchange one-liners with you as they lie ragdollized on the ground, the surprising absence of gore or death, considering that you spend the entire game impaling people on a pointy bit of metal. It’s not the deepest of games, I’d call it little more than a proof of concept for a combat engine if they hadn’t put a whole afternoon of work into making cutscenes by zooming in out on the concept art a few times. It starts with a few basic melee combat prerequisites – stab, parry, dodge – but if you rely solely on those and get surrounded by burly conquistadors you’ll soon be appreciating the plight of the dude caught in the middle of the pile at the hedgehog orgy. You tip the scales by manipulating the environment, sort of like one of the good Prince of Persia games but more furniture-centric. Swinging off chandeliers, leaping over tables, stunning people with thrown objects and temporarily kicking dudes away. Which is fitting, ‘cos the main character’s name sounds like someone falling down a flight of stairs.
In brief, it’s a create your own Errol Flynn-style flamboyant fight scene engine, and it’s full of neat little touches that reward experimentation. Blow up a cooking pot and a few seconds later it drops onto one of the enemy’s heads, and you can totally pretend that you meant to do that. Trouble is, while I have been saying games should be shorter, En Garde! represents the ironic result of that particular monkey’s paw wish. There’s only four missions and the environments don’t change much, you’ll be lucky to get a whole afternoon out of it. It’s very much a game that refuses to hang around once it’s run out of new ideas to throw at you, which I guess is laudable, but I still feel there was more territory for the combat to explore. The super attacks were all kinda lame and while you can kick people and swing off chandeliers, you can’t kick people WHILE swinging off a chandelier, and oh, what an oversight. That was basically Errol Flynn’s whole bit. Just that and his apparently grotesquely large penis.
So a good game, if a not satisfyingly present one. I definitely recommend popping by the awkwardly positioned convention booth that is En Garde! but don’t complain if they’ve run out of complementary snack bars and if the folding tables wobble when you lean on them. As I say, it’s just nice to play a game that’s nice. That doesn’t wave flaccid willies in my face on the character creation screen and dare me to flinch, and doesn’t feel the need to be realistic, gory, depressing or pretentious.
So what’s next on the old Steam firing range? Oh! It’s Blasphemous 2. Speak of the devil. And… the Inquisition will come along and jam a giant spiky metal ice cream cone on your bonce. Blasphemous is a series (apparently, now) of Metroidvania pixel art action platformers that are like Symphony of the Night meets Hellraiser 2 meets spending the weekend with your Catholic in-laws. In a vaguely Renaissance Europe-y setting, some all-powerful divine force called The Miracle has turned everyone into malformed figures from satirical anti-Catholic political cartoons, and some of them are ninety feet tall for some reason, and you, the Penitent One, have to go stab them all up once you’ve crammed your head into a great big inside-out French tickler.
And in Blasphemous 2, you… do… more of that. I find Blasphemous hard to follow because the entire plot is delivered in in dogmatic parables, and instead of health and mana it’s called shit like Sin and Guilt and Fervour, and you pick up shit with names like the Reliquary of the Psychopomp and then have to go menu exploring to figure out “Oh it’s a strength boosting accessory? Well why didn’t you just SAY that.” I call this pretentious because a mana bar is a mana bar, whatever you name it. Makes me think of those shitty Christian games where you fire truth bullets at heathens and have “faith” instead of health, it’s still the thing you get game overed for running out of, it’s just instead of dying you have to go to a state university and study engineering. And when you strip the moony-eyed, frothy-mouthed religious language off of Blasphemous 2, it’s a bog standard Symphony of the Night clone. Exploration, double jumps and drop cancelling Medusa heads a go-go. It’s not even particularly hard, for all the self-scourging and chastisement themes. It was harder early on ‘cos enemy health’s a bit spongey but more importantly the game let me pick one of three starting weapons, an interesting feature incidentally because it changes what areas you can access right of the bat, but like a chump I’d chosen something other than the Censer of Fla – the mace, alright? It’s a mace. It’s the slow thing what does more damage. And is more likely to stun, hits everything in a wide arc in front of you, frequently hits twice in one swing oh and lest we forget you can light it on flippin’ fire.
The alternatives are shitty pokey sword or two shitty pokey daggers that acquire lightning damage if you jerk them off for two minutes. So I mainly used the mace once I got it and was twatting my way through boss fight after boss fight. Whenever I play an indie soulslike or retro boomer shooter these days I’m always swiftly struck by the same question. “Is this finally the game that will make this genre interesting again?” And the answer is usually no. But I stuck with Blasphemous 2 longer than most, and I put that down largely to its visuals. Sheer effort radiates off of every square inch of the pixel art animation, and there’s so much demented creativity. Why is the lady who boosts my health potions peeling her face off? I mean, don’t let me stop you, miss, I just have some hygiene concerns. Sorry, not health potions, “bile flasks.” You like bile, Penitent One? Should’ve come to me while I was using the twin daggers, you’d have a lifetime supply.