Sang-froid -- one hour played: This is really cool, it's very hard to put into words. It's so Canadian. You play as one of two characters, brothers (I chose the lumberjack who wears plaid and has a beard, who incidentally is the Easy/Normal difficulty as opposed to the other brother who is the Hard difficulty). The story is that it's December 1858 (pre-Canada!), your sister was at the local Catholic (all good Quebecois stories are Catholic at heart, and this is explicitly so!) church when the cartoonishly corrupt and evil priest came onto her--she rejected her advances, and in the kefuffle the church got burned down. He blamed her for the situation and the town thinks she's a witch. He makes a deal with the devil to get the girl and sends packs of wolves and werewolves after you at your cabin. The game takes place over 20 or more nights.
The gameplay is divided into two main phases. First you have a planning phase. You see a top-down map of a fairly large area containing buildings. In this phase you can also go into town and buy items and gear or get blessings at the Convent. During the planning phase you see how many waves of enemies will come each night, where they will come from, and what kind of enemies they will be. Each wave has several groups of enemies coming from different locations. You need to set traps to deal with the enemies. Traps cost AP, which is limited. Some traps cost money, which is also limited. Later in the game you can voluntarily give up AP and get paid cash for doing so (this represents spending time chopping wood for sale at a lumber company). Traps include steel tooth wolf traps, pressure based spike traps, overhead nets containing rocks, bonfires that you can light for defensive purposes, bait meat, etc.
When you are ready, you start the night. You spawn in a viewpoint similar to Brutal Legend or Orcs Must Die. You have an axe and a gun. You can run and roll-dodge. All actions take stamina, which regenerates. When stamina is depleted, you become slow. Your gun is single-shot and must be manually reloaded and makes an ungodly amount of noise, so strategic use is key. Each attack you land builds up rage, which can be unleashed in the form of a powerful attack.
Enemies come in packs (YA DON'T SAY!)--each enemy has a "fear level", you do too. The enemy who is next to attack has an icon over his head so you can deal with him first. Fear levels steadily increase. When an enemy's fear level is higher than yours, it can attack. Getting closer raises fear levels. Too close and enemies can attack regardless of fear level. Yelling at enemies lowers their fear level but makes noise and attracts far-off enemies. Attacking lowers their fear level at the cost of your stamina. Bonfires greatly raise your fear level when you're near them.
You can consume items, including Canadian Whisky, to get a bonus. These cost money to buy.
The wolves attack your buildings. Damage to buildings reduces your rewards and I think leads to a game-over if they are destroyed. You have to defend multiple buildings, nowhere near each other, simultaneously and movement across the map is fairly slow so you should rely on traps to slow down or kill most enemies. You have an HP bar, which is depleted by being attacked--if you die, you lose. After a night you get experience, which can give you levelups. There's a full skill tree. You also see plot vignettes between the nights and get tutorials for new features. Everything you can do in the game has an optional tutorial video with a pleasant, older-sounding gentleman narrating.
Finally, the music is an enchanting mix of celtic folk with a fiddle, a bodhran, light guitar, etc and a sort of Jethro Tull heavy-folk-jazz vibe. There's a digeridoo in there somewhere. There's a splendid little version of
Reel a Bouche, which is a traditional folk song sung in Canada. It's gorgeous to listen to. I hate when the load screens end and the music cuts off, I'd love to just listen to the OST on its own. The game assets are all unencrypted--WAV for the audio, WMV for the video, PNG for UI element backgrounds and stuff.
The game is a little rough around the edges, load times are pretty long, some of the English voice acting is Quebecois accented, it's not going to win any best looking awards, etc. But there's a lot of heart here and what I've played so far has been very enchanting to me. I recommend Sang-Froid at its flash deal price of $5.09, and I hope that when the next sale rolls around I'm not the only one here who has played it. This was an independent game made by a Quebecois author and a small team of 5-6 people, and it made it through Greenlight, so if you want to support the process and show that it can achieve good results and help independents, here's your test case.
I posted a dozen or so explanatory screenshots on Steam:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/stumpo/screenshots/
I use colour grading on my monitor so some colours might not look right, I ran at 1680x1050 with default settings but turned up AA. I have an AMD Phenom II X3 720 at 3.0 GHz, 8 gigs of ram, a 4850, and running off a 5400 RPM hard drive and I had no performance issues besides load times.
P.S. There's a known bug with tutorial movies where only the top half of the video renders. It's a Microsoft issue dealing with how W7 handles WMVs, not an issue with the game. Check the game's discussion page on Steam for solutions if you experience it.
