Quick reflexes and brute strength will only get you so far in the brawls of Forestrike. This Devolver-published rougelike of pixel art punishment was announced last summer and has been quietly meditating in a bush somewhere ever since. But this week the developers released a demo in which you can practice the flowing dodges and sneaky turnarounds of the “Leaf” school (a style of fighting from one of five masters planned to appear in the full game). As the fighty boy of RPS, I’ve had a go. It’s quite the satisfying little bruiser. Imagine if someone demade Sifu with retro graphics and wisdomously advised you that the brain hits harder than the hand.
The hook is compelling. Each fight sees you facing off against a single screenful of dirtbags, drunks, and skeletons (the emperor has been deposed – don’t ask). Using your meditative “foresight” you can kick and punch and dodge and throw your way through a brawl as many times as you like, restarting over and over to practice towards a perfect combination of moves. Eventually you see the best approach. Boot the goon to your left, pick up his broomstick, block the beefy man to the right, dodge the next leap from a distant ne’er-do-well, then land a final swift dig in the face of a fourth creep. Very satisfying.
But this is only practice mode. You can perform as many non-final sparring sessions as you want, but when you commit to the real fight the stakes are higher. Lose all your meagre health pips in the real thing and it’s the end of a run. But succeed and you’ll unlock new skills, like being able to twist a foe 180 degrees with a tap of your fist, sending them hurtling back toward their boxing bros. Another technique hurts any enemy that you successfully dodge, meaning you can theoretically defeat a scoundrel just by stepping lightly to the side and letting them fall to the ground, where they presumably dislocate their own shoulder.
These techniques, along with your own limitations (you can only dodge once, for example), turn fights into a kind of pugilist puzzle. Some showdowns, like one boss fight against a slippery philosopher, become a challenging conundrum of counterattacks, demanding economic use of your abilities. It’s often better to let your enemies hit one another by mistake than to throw a punch yourself. I must have practiced this boss battle 30 or 40 times, but I still managed to mess it up when the stakes were high.
Some of this feels down to slight variations during a brawl. It is a puzzle – but the exact actions of your enemies may not be reliably the same every time. There’s also a sense that sometimes you might just not have the technique required to get through a fight unscathed. Your own health meter becomes a resource here – how many hits can I take just to wear down my opponent’s limited number of dodges? It’s not the cleverest or the most efficient way to earn a win. But sometimes you just need to scrape through and improvise.
With its practice-makes-possibly-perfect philosophy, and snappy Hotline Miami-esque sense of repetition, I enjoy what the game is quietly suggesting. You can practice something dozens of times, and you might still fuck up. This is true in life. A lot of experts have stories of being able to perform a skilled task or recall specialist knowledge just fine under everyday circumstances. But when the pressure is on, under testing conditions for example, they suddenly fluff it. Chess grandmasters make obvious blunders in critical matches. Theatre actors suddenly draw a blank on lines they’ve delivered hundreds of times. It’s a counterintuitive truth of skill: you are sometimes better at things when you don’t try too hard.
To bring that back to the Forestrike demo, I started to launch into early fights without properly scoping it out beyond a cursory scrap. And it sometimes worked in my favour, simply because I wasn’t overthinking. Uh, then again, I did sometimes get swiftly slam dunked into the dirt. My point is: it’s neat. That a twitchy 2D kung fu roguelike can explore ideas of practice, skill, instinct, and flow – while also letting you throw a chair at your opponent’s head – is delightful to me. Like I say, the demo is on Steam. There’s no release date as yet, but we’ll keep our muscles tensed and catch it in midair once we see one.
