Skeleton Crew Studio, developer of 2021’s Olija, has unveiled its newest game, Forestrike. In this roguelike “tactical kung-fu fighting game”, the player can preview fights and foresee their foes’ attacks and prepare a combat strategy accordingly. It’s a compelling enough foundation, but it will remain to be seen if it is enough to support a whole game.
In Forestrike, you play as a martial artist (appropriately named “Yu”) who must journey across the land towards the capital to free the Emperor. Yu has a special tool at his disposal, which is the ability to mentally foresee the events of a fight in his mind to prepare himself in the real world. Basically, take the deduction fight scenes from the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies and base a game around that concept and you have Forestrike.
At the beginning of each run, you must choose which Master to train under, which gives Yu a different special technique, such as being able to dodge through or block attacks. The player also has light and heavy attacks and is encouraged to use environmental objects such as brooms and chairs as shields or projectile weapons. As the player progresses through each run, Yu can unlock additional passive effects and special attacks to take down foes.
Forestrike uses the same minimalist pixelated art style that Olija used, to great effect. It works surprisingly well alongside the more traditional character designs during the dialogue scenes, while feeling rather appropriate for the arcade fighting game influence on the combat.
Each fight is a high-risk scenario, with Yu being rather fragile and often substantially outnumbered. Having played a short demo to experience the game’s unique mechanics for myself, I can say that the Forestrike experience really clicked once I stopped looking at it as an action game and more as a puzzle game. The player can play through each fight as many times as they like in Yu’s Foresight, and then take on the challenge for real when they feel ready to proceed. As each enemy starts their initial attacks the exact same way in both the Foresight version of the fight and real life, it became a challenge of learning how and when to attack each enemy in Foresight and then replicating those moves in the “real” fight.
While Yu controls a bit more stiffly than I would prefer, once I got into a groove and became accustomed to the mechanics, I was having a ball dodging through enemies to make them hit one another and using environmental objects as shields and weapons. The game often encourages specific unorthodox strategies, with many fights having optional objectives with rewards if you can win a fight without getting hit or by getting the enemies to defeat one another. The game even does a little replay of the fight in real time when you win, which is a pretty cool feature.
While the demo only shows a very small portion of the entire product, it will remain to be seen if there will be sufficient enemy and mechanic variety to sustain a roguelike experience. It doesn’t take long in the demo to have faced every type of enemy, and without platforming challenges or mechanically varied environments, each fight started to blend into one another. That said, there is plenty of time before the full game releases, and plenty more to see.
Forestrike is set to release in 2025 on Nintendo Switch and PC, and can currently be added to your wishlist on Steam.
About the Author
Tom Quirk
he/him
Tom Quirk plays a lot of video games, but when he isn't, he is reading fantasy novels and watching way more television than is healthy.
