I saw En Garde showcased in a YouTube video of upcoming “Souls-like” games and was immediately interested in what it had to offer. I bought this game day one, which I don’t do much anymore, but it’s also only $20 to pick up. One thing I’ll say right away is I played on PC with a PS4 controller. Usually that means I have to try to remember the Xbox controller layout to middling success. En Garde actually lets me chose the PS4 layout for buttons.

Just watching one trailer or playing a few minutes of the game, you can tell the vibe they’re going for here. The developers make no secret they were inspired by Zorro, Errol Flynn, Princess Bride, Three Musketeers, Court Jester, and other swashbuckling heroes. Your main character, Adalia de Volador, is basically lady Zorro. She’s charming, cocksure, and a hero of the people. She has a brother who serves as her Dandelion, telling the people of her stories. There’s also her romantic interest, who’s a pirate loyal to gold first and everyone else second. They all fight against the evil Count-Duke, who’s a pompous blowhard trying to take over the world. There isn’t deep character development, which isn’t a problem. They are just fun archetypes.

The game is set up like a TV show. Another source of influence appears to be those classic 90’s action comedy shows. Shows like Xena, Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, and Jack of All Trades. Each episode sees Adalia foiling the Count-Duke’s new evil plot of the week. It never takes itself too seriously though. The witty repartee between characters perfectly encapsulates that campy feel of those 90s shows. You never “kill” the guards and they all have bumbling chatter that is often humorous. Unfortunately, the gameplay requires a lot of focus, so I often missed the back'n'forth between Adalia and the guards. The world is a bright, colorful Renaissance Spain city full of flair. You explore lavish villa manors, cobblestone streets, and stone prisons. The music is exactly what you’d expect for this setting; lots of Spanish guitar, cassinettes, and trumpets. It’s overall a fun experience that had me smiling most the game.

I mentioned I learned about this game from a video covering “Souls-likes” so what’s the gameplay like? While I haven’t played a Souls game, I feel the only thing these two share is the difficulty. This game is tough, but fair. While it’s bright and punchy, the combat doesn’t pull punches. It feels right for a game about fencing that you have to master your skills with the sword. You have to learn when to dodge, strike, and parry. There’s a flow to combat and if you try to brute force through encounters you’ll end up dead, or KO’d. I had a few times I got greedy or frustrated and started taking dumb risks that got me sent back to a checkpoint. The enemy combat AI is pretty solid. There was only one time I felt like I had a cheap death where a guard teleported to me to hit me.

But this isn’t a sword fighting game, it’s a spectacle fighter. Your environment is just as important a weapon as your blade and you have to think on your feet. You can kick enemies down stairs, knock weapon racks on top of them, drop chandeliers on their heads, etc. My favorite move is letting an enemy jump up onto a table only for me to kick it out from under them and have them faceplant onto the ground. You often get swarmed by enemies and Adalia is a duelist, she fights one baddie at a time. She doesn’t have much in the way of crowd control attacks, that’s why you have to use the environment to disperse groups and stun enemies so you can pick them off one by one. The Captain goons were the hardest to deal with for me. I couldn’t figure out their attack pattern. I thought about turning the difficulty down to Easy a few times but decided to persevere on Medium. After a few deaths and a couple lucky breaks I was able to get through an encounter.

Outside of combat there’s a few platforming sections. These aren’t puzzles or challenges, more just a nice break in between the combat. Towards the end the game leans more into platforming with combat encounters being sparse but challenging. You can tell this game is right in that AA market. Its gameplay is smooth and tight, but very simplistic. It reminds me of those movie tie-in games of the PS2/PS3 era. En Garde is short, only consisting of 4 episodes, each about an hour in length. It explains the $20 price tag & is one reason I didn’t want to knock the difficulty down, I wanted to get as much time as I could from this game. I think this game is a good length. After about the 2nd episode, you’ve seen all the game’s tricks. It adds in a few little things here in the following levels, but not enough to radically change gameplay.

All in all, En Garde is oozing with charm and knows not to overstay it’s welcome. The developers nailed that 90s action-comedy camp mixed with Zorro panache. I hope this game is successful so that if the developers want to make a sequel they have the funds to really build upon this base. If you want a fun game where you can play as Zorro, I recommend En Garde.

Steam Curator

Despite a title that’s explicitly a fencing term, you won’t find the word ‘fence’ anywhere in this game’s description. Before ‘En Garde!’ is a sword-fighting game it’s a swashbuckling game—a distinction made manifest from a dual focus on multi-enemy encounters and environmental interaction.

The primary skills being tested here aren’t mastery over its swordplay, but target prioritization and item-usage-improv. It’s a joyous blend that will have you grinning not solely for the delight of striking down a villain, but also for the heroic rope swing you did to close the gap.

Its story never pretends to be anything more than an excuse to get you into new arenas with baddies, but it still delivers its themes with charming vivacity.

“En Garde’s!” critical path clocks in at around three hours, but it justifies that brevity with a focus as narrow and sharp as its heroine’s weapon.

Each of the game’s four missions is a long daisy chain where each daisy is a combat arena, and each chain is a hallway demanding basic platforming. The latter is simple by design; jumps are forgiving, swinging timing is practically automated, and falling prey to a bottomless gap lets you off with a slap on the wrist–you’ll be brought right back to the ledge with all you’re HP intact.

It's a definitive statement: these non-combat sequences are pretty and breezy palate cleansers in between the dedicated swashbuckling focus.

The combat shares DNA with Batman Arkham. Basic attacks magnetize you toward your foes, and when those foes strike back you’ll be parrying or dodging respectively depending on how red and flashy said strike is.

This combat grows its beard in the few subtle ways it deviates from that Arkham molding and the most significant way it does that is in how strongly it punishes indiscriminate blows.

Enemies have low health, one to two HP at most, but they’ll always have a balance and/or shield bar protecting them. While enemy HP will never regenerate, those meters will; the end result demands you to pick targets and land decisive strikes before moving on to the next. You can’t just slowly rot away at everyone’s HP by gliding around randomly and smashing attack—none of it will stick.

Late-game enemies can even fully and immediately regenerate their meters if you switch targets. It may sound like a poor fit for a game that inundates you with dozens of goons, until gain mastery over the style it pushes you towards—to stop relying on sword swings exclusively and start using all the interactables that litter the arena.

“En Garde!” isn’t just a classic Spanish adventure film in game form, it’s also a slapstick cartoon; our hero can do anything just shy of dropping anvils on heads. Throwable jugs will always perfectly strike your enemies, and kicking over wine containers will have grunts comically slipping on the contents. Enemies who stumble near a ledge will linger on it, arms flailing at their sides, for more than enough time to ensure you can Sparta (Espana?) kick them off.

You can even see this over-the-topness in sound design as well: knock an enemy into a wall and their stun corresponds to a loud BONK, and the long descent of airborne projectiles will have a slide whistles pitch descending along with it.

It’s goofy, hilarious fun: the game’s systems push you towards using everything other than your sword and it rewards you with comedy and slain enemies.

Maybe not even technically slain? Despite the fact everyone’s wielding exclusively sharp weapons, there’s a playful and lighthearted energy that implies non-fatality. Your defeat screen will usually have a guard barking to “fetch the manacles!”, presumably to lock our heroine in an offscreen cell she will no doubt escape from to thwart the villain yet again.

You get that impression from the episodic nature of the missions, too. They’re each distinct micro-stories with the same recurring characters: most important being our fearless and selfless protagonist, Adalia de Volador, and our all-but-mustache-twirling antagonist, “Count Duke.”

The conflict between their black-and-white ideals plays out through mid-mission dialogue but also through dedicated cutscenes. These cutscenes don’t have full animation but offset that limitation with some smart usage of key poses: heroically defiant pointing and ominous finger-tenting are the backdrop for playful monologues that hint at multiple seasons’ worth of Saturday mornings we missed.

It’s tonally excellent writing in line with the morally unambiguous adventure films it’s based on and fits the cartoon hijinx of the gameplay well.

And it ties that package together with a beautiful painting aesthetic: the streets are colorful and alive, and there are even some clever touches like distance-fog being replaced with paint smudges.

“En Garde!” is a wonderful little game that knows exactly what it is and exactly where it wants to strike. Its runtime may be similar to the movies it’s inspired by, but like those movies, it’s well-paced and endlessly worth revisiting.

There’s even a robust post-game arena mode that remixes the story's combat rooms with roguelite power-ups.

But it’s worth playing even for its campaign alone. It takes a traditional combat system and nudges it in the right spots to make something that feels entirely new—something that will make you want to don your cape and make a heroic entrance. A lot of games could learn from how confident “En Garde!” is in its execution, and I wouldn’t mind more that let me circumvent challenges with a well-timed chandelier drop to the head.

I remember learning about En garde! from the now defunct Zero Punctuation series on the basically defunct Escapist site, and it sounded like my kind of thing. See, I'm quite a fan of action games, especially one where parrying and dodging are big components. I love me some Bayonetta. And kind of like Bayonetta, En Garde! has a cheeky super badass lady protagonist. That's not really anything to do with the quality of the game, just a funny thing I noticed while typing this.

In En Garde! you play as Adalia, who I guess is sort of a troublemaker for the local tyrannical government in her quaint Spanish seaside village. The Count-Duke (I kept wondering if this was supposed to be a play on "Count Dooku" from Star Wars, but I really have no idea) is a giant bastard and must be stopped from hoarding the city's wealth so that he can fund a mighty war machine. But it's not so mighty that one pissed off lady with a sword can't beat all of them by kicking them off ledges and stuffing buckets on their heads.

The story is pretty bare-bones. The game only has four main chapters that are quite short. You could beat this in one sitting if you really tried. I did it in three. The real focus of the game is in the very cinematic combat. Adalia has a delightful variety of moves that she can pull off like vaulting over tables to reposition, throwing lanterns onto cannons to make them fire, and comedic things like kicking enemies into a rack of weapons which will then tumble over onto them. It greatly rewards using the environment, and you'll really need to.

The similarities to the Batman: Arkham series in the combat led me to play it like that in the early sections, but you're really supposed to fight dirty. You'll be absurdly outnumbered, so throwing chili powder in someone's eyes, or kicking them down the stairs are really just evening the odds. Cutting down a chandelier for it to crash onto a group of enemies is something I can't remember doing in a game before.

It's also been a while since the camera in a game really haunted me, but sometimes I felt like I was battling the camera just as much as the Count-Duke's henchmen. A decent amount of times I'd end up stuck against a wall taking attacks from enemies that I can't see. I remember the Shadow games (Shadow of Mordor) solved this by still showing the prompt even though the enemies were not on screen.

This game might be more of a proof of concept for this silly cinematic combat game. I'd like to see Fireplace Games expand on this a bit. I'd rather have something short and sweet than something that's padded to Hell, though.

En Garde is a swashbuckling comedy game with challenging combat and barely a slight aroma of a story. The setting is a vaguely Spanish kingdom during a cartoon version of the 17th century. Our heroine and her flashing rapier fence, roll, swing, and banter through 6 hours of challenging combat as she foils the evil schemes of the Count-Duke. Probably the best easter egg there were the quotes from The Princess Bride that get dropped amidst the chaos. It was all enjoyable, both the banter and the gameplay/combat that emphasized the chaotic back and forth of a swashbuckling movies, with the hero swinging from curtains, knocking the clumsy enemies into each other, using improvised weapons, and out-fencing the opposition with panache. The fencing is relatively simple but feels genuine.

I saw the game described as a Souls-like somewhere and the combat is certainly difficult. However, you have the option to turn on and off “invincibility” at any time. Frankly, I would be fine if every single souls-like offered this option. It allowed me to advance when some bosses were beyond my meager skills. That kept the fun rolling without letting frustration ruin it.

I played entirely on Steam Deck and it worked perfectly. The graphics are cartoonish enough that I don’t think it would have been a big difference to have played with a higher resolution.