It went better in my head
Carefully plan your moves and master different fighting styles in Forestrike, a brutal martial arts roguelike where careful planning and sharp reflexes are the key to defeating your opponents. In Forestrike, every battle takes place in your head until you can finally craft the perfect winning strategy, after all, “Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”
Developed by Skeleton Crew Studio, Forestrike is a fitting addition to Devolver’s catalog as a publisher, feeling right at home with some of their other “try until you get it right” titles, like Hotline Miami, My Friend Pedro, and Katana Zero.
MSRP: $9.99
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Switch
While Forestrike might look like a regular beat ‘em up at first glance, its fights are actually structured like puzzles, forcing you to work around a limited amount of defensive resources in order to survive each stage. The game’s main gimmick, foresight, allows you to endlessly retry every fight before committing to a real attempt, giving you the opportunity to learn each enemy’s moveset and how to pick out priority targets in order to get a perfect clear. Learning that Skeleton Crew previously worked on a fighting game is entirely unsurprising, as the process of using foresight to build muscle memory feels eerily similar to labbing out a new character by using combo challenges in something like Marvel vs Capcom or Street Fighter.
Now, foresight as a mechanic sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch? Well, the game gives you the ability to try out every fight until you believe you can do it perfectly, and that’s because perfection is the minimum requirement. Forestrike is extremely difficult to play solely relying on reaction, and while it does sound cool to ditch the planning and go into fights blindly (something you are eventually required to do), most fighting schools only have the ability to perform one or two defensive maneuvers per fight, meaning you are spread thin when dealing with 4-6 enemies simultaneously. The entire game revolves around using resources in the right order and trying to regain them as soon as possible, meaning you can get hit, but you better have a way to heal before the fight ends, otherwise that mistake will snowball into your defeat.
Forestrike is surprisingly dialogue-heavy for a roguelike, allowing you to train under different masters and learn about their ideas on what martial arts should be. Every master tags along on your mental journey to defeat the Admiral and save the Emperor, providing you with insight into their backstories and relationships with the other schools. Nodai, the master of the cold eye, is a standout, a bitter veteran who employs a fighting style based on retaliation and endurance, eventually relying on firearms as he becomes disillusioned by martial arts altogether. The different masters that accompany you during runs have a lot to say, and it’s fun to see that they have their own character arcs alongside the protagonist.
While its combat and story are quite engaging, Forestrike fails to deliver on the randomization aspect of a roguelike, as the game’s stages seem to feature a predetermined set of fights thrown out in random order, with each region only having one boss. There is some randomization to be found when it comes to the techniques and trinkets you acquire during runs, but on top of being tough as nails, the game is extremely stingy with the resources it gives you, making some of the stronger techniques very rare to find. It’s not uncommon to feel like you are fighting for your life throughout an entire run, and the game is not shy about heavily punishing you for making a single mistake, which can lead to some frustration.
Charming and extremely difficult, Forestrike is a niche game that appeals to those who enjoy the heavy execution that comes with fighting games and certain character action titles, constantly alternating between soaring highs and crushing lows. There’s nothing better than perfectly downloading the needed muscle memory to clear a stage in one clean combo, and there’s nothing worse than seeing your plan immediately crumble, and while I wouldn’t have it any other way, I do believe some stages might be overturned at the moment, to the point of possibly not being solvable, at least in my experience.
Forestrike’s ability to turn mechanical knowledge into meta progression creates a very addictive and enjoyable gameplay loop, allowing you to slowly get better at solving each encounter with grace rather than through brute force. While it does unfortunately fail to provide much when it comes to randomization, the combat system does a great job at carrying the experience, even if the game is overly punishing at points. There are still a couple of rough spots that need to be polished, like the hitstop being way too long, something that can completely throw off your timing when parrying, as well as the RNG for techniques being rough, but Forestrike is bound to please those interested in brutally difficult titles.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.