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Skeleton Crew, the team behind the 2021 side-scrolling action game Olija, and Devolver Digital have revealed an intriguing new project: Forestrike. The game sports a unique premise: as a martial artist, you can foresee and simulate future combat encounters, allowing you to perfect your execution before laying a finger on anyone.
The fighter battles to free a captive Emperor from an evil Admiral, and doing so involves mastering Foresight, a meditative technique to mentally predict and play out battles before they unfold (for Dragon Ball fans, think of image training). Gameplay-wise, players are pitted against different combinations of enemy types. They use Foresight to play the battle in advance to find the optimal approach to defeating them while taking little to no damage.
For example, using Foresight may help you learn to dodge a charging enemy so they trample an ally, then finish him off by lobbing a nearby weapon. Determining the best approach may take several Foresight attempts, but once you have your strategy down, you then execute the battle in real-time. After winning a fight, a replay feature allows you to rewatch it using slow-motion and other editing tools to study your strategy or generally feel cool about your performance.
Using the Foresight makes Forestrike’s combat feel puzzle-like in its execution, and winning fights as flawlessly as possible matters. That’s because you have limited health to fight through multiple stages in a roguelike-style branching map. Along the way, you’ll earn upgrades that carry over to future runs, as well as perks called Techniques that enhance your abilities.
Forestrike is a neat spin on the action genre, and it’s slated to launch sometime in 2025 for Switch and PC.