The Montpellier-based publisher Dear Villagers introduced me to some of its games at gamescom 2022. The Foretales titles and the new Naheulbeuk DLC will be presented to you here. As for Souldiers, I invite you to read the article concocted for you some time ago on this link.
Pretend
One of my favorites of this gamescom is Foretales, developed by Alkemi, a card game that has absolutely nothing to do with Slay The Spire, as many seemed to believe! Indeed, this game offers us to settle many situations according to the cards we have, which correspond to the characters we control. And this, with very many hidden effects and tricks in all directions. The most observant are likely to have fun.
Pretend
You have location cards in the middle, action cards at the bottom, guard cards and a re-draw which allows you to recover cards that have already been played. You will have, with your action cards, to solve the problems that are posed to you (find objects, impress a person, recover food, etc...) by using all the means at your disposal. A problem can have many solutions, and each decision will have consequences. For example, a robbery in the market will be able to attract guards and add some to the deck corresponding to it, which will force you to fight them if you come across them.
The fights take place in two phases: the negotiation phase, where you can send an enemy to reduce the morale of the troops in front, who flee if it drops to zero. You can use fame, terror, gold or even use hidden secrets, listening to the sentences of the enemies. If you don't succeed, and this is the second phase, you will have to fight and get away with actions that will be more... brutal. Once an area is completed, you can farm this area as well as possible by exhausting the re-draw pile which will reduce with each hit, before moving on to the next area with its many quests and challenges that await you.
In itself, I liked this game with its false simplicity and its many secrets. Also counting on its puzzles as strange as they are mysterious, on its share of characters: Leo the dark tiger or Volpin the raven, master burglar, and on all this world just waiting to be explored, this game has many assets and should have its small effect when it is released on September 15, 2022.
Naheulbeuk: Back to the futon
Our brave (keuf keuf) adventurers left to conquer the dungeon of Naheulbeuk... with the success that we know of them. This time, our braves have traveled through time to solve a temporal problem, but many, many surprises await them, including a strange link between the Ranger, a chair re-upholsterer from father to son, and an architect strange and as fearful as he is. The duration of the DLC is planned to be equal to half of the main game.
That's pretty much all the info I have on the title, developed by Artefacts Studio. Unfortunately this type of game does not lend itself to a quick test during a presentation. Release planned for this summer.
Conclusion
In my opinion, Foretales is a very good game in the making and which can delight many players, Souldiers has already appeared with a preview. As for Back to the Futon, new DLC, I saw too little gameplay and was given too little information to get a real idea. However, I think I'll give it a try when it comes out, and until then we'll probably have more news!
