Forestrike is a tactical kung-fu roguelike that lets you orchestrate fights with time-bending powers

Kicking its way onto Steam next year

Image credit: Devolver Digital

Devolver have just announced Forestrike, a 2D kung-fu game where you’re not smashing buttons in a beat ’em up format. Instead, you use your supernatural time-bending abilities to tactically dispatch goons in a roguelike bash through increasingly difficult levels. It looks like a mixture of things: Sifu, Katana Zero, Aesthetically Cool Stuff In General.

In Forestrike, you play as Yu, a martial artist who’s trying to free the emperor from an evil admiral’s influence. Presumably, pulling the admiral aside for a quick chat hasn’t cut it. So Yu does what anyone would do: use his Foresight ability to mentally pre-roll fights over and over again, so he can plan and annihilate anyone and anything that stands in his way.

Watch on YouTube

Each mission starts with Yu surrounded by mobs of lads who aren’t happy to see you. What you’ll do is use Foresight to experiment, free of consequence. This might involve, say, seeing what might happen if you dodge a thrown spear, then roundhouse the lad creeping up behind you. Once you’ve seen what happens, good or bad, you can rewind time and execute the right sequence of moves to finish the fight perfectly.

According to the game’s Steam page and the trailer above, there’s upgradeable and customisable movesets and a map, where you decide after each mission what you’d like to do. For instance, rest at an inn, fight more baddies, maybe learn some fearsome uppercut. It looks like there’s a passive upgrade called “Wild Reflexes” that lets you grab thrown objects in mid-air, then fling whatever it is back into the chops of the assailant. Sold.

I’m curious to see how the devs Skeleton Crew Studio and Thomas Olsson balance Foresight so there’s just the right amount of trial and error to its reactive, real-time kung-fu-ing. I’m sure Foresight will be a thing you can only activate a few times per fight, maybe even less on tougher difficulties. Heck, I can see there being a Foresight-less mode.

Forestrike is out sometime in 2025 and you can keep up with it over on Steam.

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