From Assassin’s Creed to Rocksteady’s Batman trilogy, from Absolver to For Honor, games never tire of coming up with interesting permutations of combat duels to fulfil the power fantasy of being a suave fighter. And then there’s En Garde!, a game determined to let us know that you can’t spell funeral without fun.
You take on the role of Adalia de Volador, a renowned swashbuckler, ready to face a cruel Count-Duke and his minions in battle. In colourful environments that make Spain look like a giant theatre stage, Adalia confronts her enemies with a sharp sword and an equally sharp tongue. The heart of En Garde! is the carefully controlled chaos of its combat – you parry, attack and jump away from large groups of enemies, none of whom politely wait for their turn to stab you. Adalia can kick barrels, drop chandeliers, throw jugs left on tables and smack enemies with lutes. Foes come equipped with more than 3,000 individual voice lines, adding a chorus of “haha!” “hoho!” and “surrender now!” to the fighting as you run rings around them.
It’s silly fun that never leaves you in doubt that you’re supposed to be the superior duellist, but developer Fireplace Games wanted to allow for different playstyles: the game has been compared to everything from Assassin’s Creed to Dark Souls. “We didn’t favour one approach over the other,” says co-founder Anaïs Simonnet. “You have the challenge of fencing and the cartoonish element in using the environment, and you can choose what to focus on.”
The slapstick-tinged combat attests to the fact that Adalia is a swashbuckler – not a pirate. If you were hitherto unaware of the difference, the game’s artist and narrative designer, Julien Fenoglio, explains: “Swashbuckling, de cape et d’épée as we call it in French, has a distinct vibe – where pirates are kind of dirty or rough-and-tumble, swashbucklers merge action with artistic refinement. They are more urban, more elegant.”
“We also wanted to make a game about a part of culture you learn about as a French person,” says Simonnet. “I think it would have been really inappropriate to choose a foreign setting for us, create very archetypal characters and make jokes about them … It’s very French to make fun of your own culture, and a lot of French humour is deeply satirical. We were really adamant about setting the game in Europe, about putting a spotlight on Musketeers, because you see those tropes everywhere, but not their origins.”
“At first we looked at things like The Three Musketeers, Zorro, Dumas, that kind of stuff,” Fenoglio says. “But then when you look at these heroes from pop culture a little more closely, you find it returns pretty close to home – the studio is in Montpellier, which is home to a bunch of swashbuckling characters.”
En Garde!’s proudly bisexual Spanish female protagonist isn’t entirely like those traditional heroes, though Simonnet says this wasn’t a deliberate attempt to buck a trend. “In the game your gender is not important,” she says. “We talked a lot about how we didn’t want enemies to be sexist when they mock you, just because when I’m a player, I don’t want to hear that sort of thing.” En Garde! has what Fenoglio describes as an “overall anti-authoritarian vibe” – its fencing is fun, flamboyant and a touch fabulous.
The most important thing for Fireplace Games is to let players enjoy the game in their own way. “You get what you give,” Fenoglio says. “A good swashbuckler makes a plan, but when those plans go awry, you improvise.”
En Garde! is out 16 August on PC
