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En Garde!
game
•7/26/2026

En Garde!

byFireplace Games
Steam
7.6
The Verdict
"En Garde! is a small, superbly-made thing that knows exactly what it is. The combat is the real article — a rhythm-and-positioning system that makes competent players look like fight choreographers — and the writing gives it a personality most games with ten times the budget never find. For a few hours it is one of the most purely enjoyable action games of its year." "Then it stops, and you're left holding a system you've only just learned to speak fluently. Arena Mode extends the runway but can't build a second act. That's the honest ledger: exceptional craft, insufficient quantity, and a developer that has since gone silent, which forecloses any hope the gap gets filled later." "Buy it at a discount and you'll walk away delighted. Buy it at full price expecting a meal rather than a very good appetizer and the math gets harder to defend. Either way, play it — this is the kind of focused, opinionated mid-size game the industry needs more of, and the fact that it left me wanting significantly more is, in its own frustrating way, the highest compliment I can pay it."

Gallery

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Key Features

Parry-Riposte-Lunge Combat: A three-beat rhythm system built on read-and-react timing rather than combo memorization. Blocking is a commitment, parrying is a window, and the riposte is your reward. It's fencing as call-and-response, not as damage math.
The Panache Meter: Style is a resource. Fighting with flair — environmental kills, clean parries, showboating — fills a meter that unlocks special moves and finishers. It's a direct incentive structure pushing you away from safe play, and it's the smartest design decision in the game.
Arenas as Playgrounds: Every fight space is loaded with interactive junk. Kick barrels into crowds, cut chandeliers loose, shove guards off balconies, jam a bucket over someone's head and watch them stagger into their friends. The environment isn't set dressing; it's your second weapon.
Episodic Campaign: Four episodes across distinct painted locations, each with its own set pieces, secrets and escalating challenges.
Arena Mode: A separate randomized-scenario mode with rotating modifiers, built explicitly to extend the life of the combat system past the credits.
Continuous Battle Banter: Adalia and her opponents trade insults mid-duel, dynamically, throughout every encounter. It is written with actual comic craft.

The Good

Parry-riposte combat with real depth and immediate legibility
Environmental combat is inventive and consistently satisfying
Genuinely funny writing and dynamic battle banter
Hand-painted art direction that will age gracefully
Excellent character animation sells the swashbuckling fantasy
Approachable difficulty without dumbing down the systems

The Bad

Campaign ends in roughly four hours, right as it gets good
Thin enemy roster; you've seen every archetype by episode two
Environmental interactions become a checklist by the back half
Arena Mode lacks the build variety to sustain long-term replay
Steam-exclusive with a studio that's gone quiet since launch
Panache Meter is under-communicated in the HUD during chaos

In-Depth Review

Bottom Line: En Garde! is the most charming fencing game nobody finished talking about, because there wasn't much to talk about after four hours. The parry-riposte combat is genuinely excellent and the comic timing is sharper than the sword — but the campaign evaporates just as the systems start singing.

The Gameplay Loop

Most action games ask you to memorize. En Garde! asks you to listen.

The combat is built on a small, legible vocabulary. Enemies telegraph. You parry, and the parry window is generous enough to feel achievable but tight enough that landing it feels earned. The riposte that follows is the payoff — a clean, snappy counterattack with weight behind it. Lunges close distance. Kicks create space and set up environmental kills. That's mostly it, and the restraint is deliberate.

What elevates this above a competent tutorial-level dueling system is crowd management. You are almost never fighting one guard. You're fighting four, and they're arranged around you in a way that punishes tunnel vision. The game essentially becomes a positioning puzzle running at real-time speed: keep them queued, use the terrain, never let two of them attack from opposite sides simultaneously. When it clicks — when you parry one guard into a stagger, kick a barrel into the two behind him, and vault a table to reposition before the fourth closes in — the game achieves something rare. It makes you feel choreographed. Not skilled, exactly. Cinematic. Like the fight was blocked by a stunt coordinator and you're just hitting your marks.

That's the trick, and it's a genuinely clever one. Fireplace built a system where competent play looks like a movie fight, which means the fantasy delivers without demanding expert-level execution.

Where the Design Runs Out of Road

The problem is arithmetic. A combat system this focused needs content to justify its depth curve, and there isn't enough.

The campaign runs three to five hours across those four episodes. I'd put the honest number closer to four. And the trouble isn't just brevity — plenty of great games are four hours long. The trouble is where the four hours land relative to the learning curve. You spend roughly the first hour learning the grammar, the second hour getting comfortable, and by the third hour you're finally fluent enough to improvise. That's exactly when a game like this should open up: introduce enemy types that break your habits, arenas that punish your favorite tricks, encounters that demand new sentences from the vocabulary you've built.

Instead, it ends. The credits roll at the precise moment the game becomes interesting. Outlets including PC Magazine and CGMagazine landed on "repetitive" and "short and disappointing," and while I think "disappointing" overstates it — what's here is delightful — the repetition complaint is fair on the merits. The enemy roster is thin. You meet the archetypes early, and the last episode is largely the same fighters in slightly different rooms. The environmental interactions, so thrilling in hour one, become a checklist by hour three: yes, there's the chandelier; yes, there's the barrel.

Arena Mode and the Replayability Question

Fireplace clearly saw this coming, which is why Arena Mode exists. Randomized scenarios, rotating modifiers, escalating waves — a pure expression of the combat with none of the narrative overhead.

It works, partially. Arena Mode is the correct answer to "I want more of this," and it's where the system's depth actually gets tested. Modifiers force adaptation in ways the campaign never quite does. But it's a structural patch on a content problem, not a solution. Roguelite-adjacent modes live or die on build variety and meaningful run-to-run divergence, and En Garde! doesn't have the mechanical breadth to sustain that. There's no progression tree deep enough to chase, no unlock cadence pulling you forward. After a few sessions you've seen the shape of it.

The Writing

Credit where it's overwhelmingly due: the banter is excellent. Not "good for a video game" — actually funny. Adalia trades barbs mid-parry with guards who are dim, unionized in spirit, and frequently more sympathetic than their employer. The dialogue is dynamic enough that it rarely repeats within a fight, and the vocal performance sells the swagger without tipping into smugness. This is the connective tissue holding four hours together, and it's why the game is remembered as fondly as it is.

Editorial Disclaimer

The reviews and scores on this site are based on our editorial team's independent analysis and personal opinions. While we strive for objectivity, gaming experiences can be subjective. We are not compensated by developers for these scores.