En Garde! Demo

[76561199400492014]

Hi Steam Community!

EDIT: for anyone who missed the news, we have removed the demo of the game after the end of Steam Next Fest as we prepare for the launch of the full game on August 16th. We are sorry if you didn't have the time to play it, but we hope you are excited to try the full game when it releases!

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Original message:
We’re super excited to introduce our game En Garde! to the world with a playable demo! If you have any questions or thoughts to share with us regarding the demo or the full game, you can post it here and we’ll make sure to read it!
We polished this demo as much as possible but you can still encounter bugs or crashes. We’re sorry for any inconvenience you might have while playing.
If you have trouble playing the demo or encounter game-breaking bugs, you can also send us an email at [e-mail]

We can’t wait to hear from you!

- Fireplace Games

[Functional Player]

Gameplay Experience

Played the demo on a Steam Deck at Normal Difficulty and Hard Difficulty and beaten the Arena.

Notes and Thoughts

As a fan of parry-based systems, I really like this lenient implementation focusing more on crowd control and environmental awareness rather than mechanical execution and complexity from what I perceive in the demo. I appreciate the attack markers for normal and special attacks and probably has a forgiving parry window which is nice (considering the others in its genre.) The humor though is not for me but as long as it is not too annoying I can live with it. Lastly, the healing is really forgiving but I do not mind it as long as encounters are paced properly. Healing with special attacks is interesting which encourages aggressive use of specials.

Thankfully, my issues here are few:

• 44fps on Steam Deck. Currently playing at 44fps with almost everything turned off or low to have a smooth experience. Perhaps overall performance tweaking would be appreciated considering the areas are small.
  
• Camera clips into walls. While fighting, I tend to rotate the camera and it goes inside walls, so i cannot see anything and have to reposition. I do not need an auto-camera but perhaps some transparency would be fine.
  
• No lock-on system Since this game is about crowd control, moving around while having some target focused would help.
  
• Highlighting targeted enemies before attacking. This support option is similarly found in Batman Arkham Knight where holding a direction before attacking highlights enemies that will be attacked to avoid guessing who the attack will hit which really helped.
  
• Encountered a game freeze on dying in the arena. Only happened once.
  
• Changing setting in-game bug Changing the setting in the main menu works fine; however, the settings would not allow me to move down after the second option seeming to be stuck since some options are possibly hidden in-game.

Still, good demo and will await for its full release.

[SomethingGifted]

Loved the demo. My only feedback is that there were some minor stutters, so possibly some shader compilation when the game first starts would be good here?

[FireplaceGames]

Originally posted by The Third Mattress:

- Ease the difficulty on parries and dodges its hard to feel like a hero after reattempting an encounter for the 4th time.

Hi The Third Mattress, is your comment based on the easy difficulty? If not, have you tried changing the difficulty in the setting menu? You'll have to go through the main menu to see the option. If you could provide any thought on the easiest difficulty it'd be awesome.
Also, should you wish to, there is an assist mode in the settings that will prevent your from dying while keeping all feedback like animations, vfx, sfx when you get hit, so you can still try to do a no hit run without ever the need to restart an arena.

[F3MTO]

Bonjour!
J'ai testé la démo tout à l'heure, j'ai vraiment apprécié le jeu, Déjà la BO est juste excellente et se marie super bien avec le visuel du jeu. Le système de combat marche très bien et est très dynamique :) Jeu super fun et drôle, les actions pouvant être effectuées avec l'environnement sont super satisfaisantes et peuvent mener à des situations bien marrantes. L'humour du jeu marche bien pour moi, j'ai adoré cet univers cliché poussé à fond c'est top! :)
Les animations sont top aussi, le gameplay en général est très plaisant.
J'ai eu un crash du jeu en mode Arène en difficulté Difficile avec 3 gardes lançant une attaque au même moment (2 standard et une impossible à parer) et en effectuant une esquive en arrière le jeu freeze et un message d'erreur Unreal Engine apparaît.
Bravo encore, j'attends la sortie du jeu et vous souhaite tout le meilleur!! :)

[Zeruca]

As a Steam Deck player the game needs to be better optimized (here comes the "its only the demo" people) because it launches in August and on Steam Deck it struggles to keep 30 fps on medium settings.

[jon]

The invert y axis option doesn't work for mouse and keyboard controls. I can't overcome years of upside downness.
Wishlisted though, will try again if it gets patched.

[Ebenezer_Arvigenius]

Really enjoyed the demo. The art design is really top notch. Loved spending time in this world!

The music is also a very good fit. Understated but really helping with the atmosphere.

Combat so far is pretty standard. Reminds me a lot of Hand of Fate but lacks the resource management and weapon choices that make that one work. Parry prompts are way too fast for me but I'm getting old. A selector for reaction speed only (without making anything else easier) would be a nice touch for us old farts. Easy mode is working well for me in this regard :D.

The combat could really use some explanations for the icons. The final fight had lots of bars going up and down without any explanation. El Vigilante pretty much randomly getting back to full health was extremely frustrating and left me so strongly feeling like I had no control over the fight, that in the end I used the invincibility mode to get past it. After a dozen tries or so I was tired of guessing if something I did was having any effect or just represented treading water.

One frustrating thing is the characters' low mobility on defense as opposed to attack. While you can attack over half the map, it's next to impossible to disengage without taking hits. That creates a situation where it's very hard to recover from mistakes as you'll basically get instantly stun-locked by groups.

In conclusion, I'm totally sold on the style. Not sure at this time if it has enough substance for a longer game. That would probably require more mechanics or a really good story. One thing to look out for imho is to keep the fighting aspect central. It might easily become another gimmick game like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, where you basically run from environment element to environment element, solving "action puzzle" rooms instead of having a sword fight.

[Haru]

The maximum volume level is quite quiet. I'm used to lowering the volume in games to about 70%, but in this game I wanted to turn it up, but it was already at the maximum.

On the keyboard, it is inconvenient to press Enter to skip pop-ups when one hand is on WASD and the other is on the mouse.

[Pvt.Simpson כבוד הרב]

The demo has major performance issues on my PC, From low FPS on the lowest settings to stutters that make it unplayable for me. Would love to give it another chance when the issues get fixed!

[Hoganes]

just finished the demo and while i enjoy it, i kinda hate how chatty the protagonist was during the game

i just feel the protagonist looks way too old for the voice she have?

[Trilantini]

Overall great game, but would wish if there was a lock on enemy or something, especially when i need to fight more of them or when i want to kick specifically the one.

As of bugs, encountered two: one was a straith up fatal crash with error window, maybe i pressed two many times in short period (wanted to make screenshot) and second is each time when I die, the camera starts from a ground (so I can see through the floor) and slowly rises until it focuses on where my character is

[Alien platypus]

First of all, I want to thank the team at fireplace games. They have created the combat system I always dreamt of but never knew how to implement myself. This game was by far the high point of summer games fest and it wasn't even close.

I have one simple request to make this game even close to perfect in my book. Please let us kick doors open. Of all the incredible environmental interactions this game has, this is the one I felt was missing. I want to be able to dramatically/flamboyantly kick open a door and declare my presence to my enemies.

Again, thank you to the team, and I can't wait for the final release.

[Thicc Mommy Milkers Enjoyer]

Hello Fireplace Games Developers, I really love what the demo had to offer and enjoyed my time through and through with it. From gameplay, to artstyle to even the humorous nature of the story/dialogue. There are only three things I would like to leave feedback on that I hope you would take into consideration.

1. Unblockable attacks - The game is already very warm on the colors, so having the unblockable attack colored red/orange-ish is making it very hard for a lot of my friends to see and properly react to on time. As it has been suggested here before maybe add something on top of the enemies as an alert for the unblockable attack or change the color of it or let us change the color of it. Like as an example parry is easier to do because the effect is blue/white-ish so it is a hard contrast to the warm color palette the game uses.

2. Draw Distance - The further objects/models are away from the player they turn into this beautiful oily painting at a distance and I like that. However some of my friends didn't enjoy that and I was wondering if we could get a draw distance setting or slider for that so that players that prefer the higher resolution textures that are nearby them to also be rendered at a higher distance by almost removing the oily painting style from afar.

3. NVIDIA DLSS/AMD FSR - I have a high-end PC configuration so this game ran smoothly on my end however my RTX 3090 TI was struggling in the high 80% usage. I am aware that you have time to optimize the game however I am worried for some players that don't have top of the line hardware and how that will impact there performance. This is why I want to recommend the addition to these upscaling technologies especially AMD FSR since it can be used by any graphics card and it is not limited to a particular series lineup like NVIDIA DLSS is.

Thank you very much for taking your time to read this and I hope you have a wonderful day ♥

[Infected Ronin]

Bonjour
Arena infini s'il vous plait :D

[lolon585]

I played on medium the arena and the story, and the camera is a thing to reconsider, some times you get totally blinded by the camera due to buildings around.

I played with a PS4 controller and the "Accept" button doesnt work on tutorial windows in game, i had to use the enter button from keyboard.

The game is so cool and is a for sure buy