En Garde!

There is a specific kind of heartbreak reserved for games that do one thing beautifully and then stop. En Garde!, from Fireplace Games (developer and publisher), is that game. It arrived on Steam on August 16, 2023, with the confidence of a studio that knew exactly what it wanted to be: a playable Errol Flynn movie, sun-bleached and sarcastic, where a duel is a conversation and every room is a trap you get to spring.

The pedigree matters here. This began as an award-winning student project — the kind of thing that usually stays a portfolio piece — and got picked up by Kowloon Nights, the funding outfit with an uncomfortably good track record for spotting exactly this sort of idiosyncratic mid-size gem. That origin explains both the game’s virtues and its ceiling. The core mechanic has clearly been polished for years by people obsessed with it. Everything surrounding that mechanic — content volume, enemy roster, environmental variety — has the scope of a team that scaled up fast and shipped on a student project’s blueprint.

You play Adalia de Volador, a swashbuckler with the moral clarity of Zorro and the impulse control of Bugs Bunny, running a one-woman insurgency against a tyrannical Count-Duke in a whimsical, hand-painted 17th-century Spain. She is the best thing in the game. She is also carrying the game.

Market positioning is where it gets interesting. In 2023 the action-game conversation was dominated by punishing, systems-dense combat — the Souls lineage and its descendants demanding hundreds of hours and a tolerance for humiliation. En Garde! is the counter-programming: a combat system with real depth that never once wants to hurt you. It’s approachable without being shallow, comedic without being a joke game. The audience that found it loved it — but it remains a beloved game a relatively small number of people played.

• 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 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 turns this from a competent tutorial-level dueling system into something more 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 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 is a short one across those four episodes — a single sitting for most players, over in an evening or two. And the trouble goes beyond brevity — plenty of great games are short. The trouble is where that runtime lands relative to the learning curve. You spend the first stretch learning the grammar, the next getting comfortable, and only near the end are you 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 “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 early on, become a checklist by the back half: 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. The shape of it reveals itself quickly.

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 the short campaign together, and it’s why the game is remembered as fondly as it is.

The art direction is the other half of the pitch. Fireplace went for hand-painted, storybook-adjacent stylization — warm ochres, terracotta, sun-bleached stone, brushwork visible in the textures — and it’s a smart call on two fronts. Aesthetically, it evokes the Golden Age adventure films the game is riffing on. Practically, stylization ages better than fidelity and costs a fraction as much to produce. A small team chasing photoreal 17th-century Spain would have shipped something uglier and later.

Character animation is the standout technical achievement. Adalia moves with genuine theatrical weight — the flourishes, the recovery frames, the way she resets her stance between exchanges. Animation quality is doing enormous work in selling the fencing fantasy, and it holds up.

On paper, performance should be a non-issue by design. It’s a modestly-scoped action game with contained arenas and no open world to stream — a game of this scope is light on hardware, and the arenas are built small enough that demanding hardware shouldn’t be a barrier. Frame pacing matters more here than raw framerate, though — parry windows are timing-critical — so any dropped input stings more than it would in a slower game.

The UI is clean, minimal, and mostly stays out of the way. The complaint: the Panache Meter deserves more prominence. It’s the mechanic driving your entire moment-to-moment decision-making, and it sits at the periphery of your attention during exactly the chaotic multi-enemy fights where you most need to read it.

Steam is the only home this game has, and that appears to be permanent. There’s no console port, no mobile ambitions. What you see is what shipped.

Play it on a controller. This is not a preference, it’s a design reality. The combat is analog-stick directional — targeting, dodging, and repositioning all key off stick angle — and the parry-riposte rhythm maps to face buttons with a tactility that mouse-and-keyboard simply doesn’t replicate. Full controller support is solid, rumble is used with restraint on parries, and the whole control scheme reads as gamepad-first. Keyboard-and-mouse works and is fully rebindable, but you’re fighting the interface instead of the guards.

One point of genuine caution that has nothing to do with the code: the studio has been publicly quiet since 2023, and the official site appears to be offline. The game is complete, standalone, and requires no live service to function — nothing here depends on a server. But anyone hoping for post-launch content, additional episodes, or a fixed bug should calibrate expectations to zero. What’s on Steam is the finished artifact.

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.

At $4.99, the price softens the blow — as a cheap, complete curiosity, it’s easy to recommend to the right player. But as a general recommendation, the math is harder to defend: a brilliant core wrapped in too little game, with no sign of more coming. This is the kind of focused, opinionated mid-size game the industry needs more of — the frustration is that this one needed more game.