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.
