Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves (2013)

Now here's a game that caught me by surprise. Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves is Montreal-based Artifice Studio's first title, and in spite of some general shabbiness in its presentation, they've done enough things right here that I'll be keeping an eye out for their future releases.

In Sang-Froid, you play a pair of Canadian woodsman brothers, defending their sister (as well as the surrounding community) from nightly assaults by supernatural forces both Christian and Pagan in nature. Gameplay takes the form of an innovative and wonderfully executed combination of chop-em-up action, clever tower defense, and Rainbow Six-style tactical planning. Each day presents you with a chunk of storyline, and then lets you spend your limited daylight hours setting up traps on your property or logging at the local lumber yard for extra cash (which is spent on weapons, items, and some of the more dramatic and powerful trap-types). Thanks to your psychic sister, you know ahead of time what kinds of enemies will be attacking, where they'll come from, and what they intend to destroy; setting appropriate traps for each situation is crucial to survival, as you can only be in one place at a time, and your combat prowess is hardly a match for a single werewolf, let alone a pack of several.

When night falls, the assault begins and you get to see if your defenses hold up. Armed with an axe, a rifle, and whatever consumables you've brought with you, you've got to do everything in your power to wipe out the assaulting units. At its simplest, you can engage opponents in melee, killing off opponents that you either hadn't set traps for or which manage to survive whatever you'd prepared. While the controls are a little wobbly at times, the combat options are innovative, simple, and very intelligent. When you aren't out busting skulls, however, your job will be to run from trap to trap, activating them at the right time to deal the most damage, or letting the enemy catch your scent and then luring them to their fiery/spiky/bouldery doom. Several enemies are very resilient to your weapon attacks, and without intelligent use of traps they can be nearly unbeatable in hand-to-hand combat. You can get around this by wielding blessed or silver weaponry, but you can only carry one axe at a time, and you can't have it both ways.

I haven't had this much fun with a game in a long, long time. All the trap varieties are useful in their own way, adding interesting layers to the strategy. Plotting out the most effective and efficient layout for each level is a bit intimidating at first, but quickly becomes very satisfying; there's nothing quite like knowing you've set up a fool-proof murder gauntlet and then seeing it work like a charm. Running through the woods, sneaking up on your prey as it munches on the bait you've left out; or ziplining over the forest to engage a band of demons at precisely the right moment... Each night's encounter is demanding enough to make you work for it, and all the elements involved in pulling it off are simply fun. Based purely on the gameplay, Sang-Froid is an easy title to recommend.

It does have a few weaknesses though. The game suffers beneath an occasionally stuttery framerate, no-budget cutscenes, fairly basic character models, a script that's difficult to take seriously, and a voice acting cast made up of amateurs (several of whom likely have English as a second language). This is more than counterbalanced by a gorgeous musical score, an unorthodox and inventive setting that drowns out the actual writing, and the stellar gameply mentioned above. If it weren't for the fact that nobody seems to know it exists, I'd say Sang-Froid has all the makings of a truly great cult classic.