Foretales is a card game set in one of those anthropomorphic animal fantasy settings that indie games seem to like. It’s not small-child-scary-world industry-dominating phenomenon, but it crops up semi-regularly.
Foretales is a card game, you have a party of hopefully three characters, and you draw a hand of six cards in even proportion, so with three characters, that’s two cards from each deck. Once a deck runs out, your hand size goes down with it. If one of your three characters is out of cards, you only have four cards in your hand. Cards do different things when played on different location cards, so if you play the thief protagonist’s Nimble Hands card on a market place, he’ll steal some gold, but play it on a tavern and he’ll steal some food. If you run out of cards, you can no longer really interact with the game at all, so you’ve got to rest, which gets you back three cards for every party member but usually comes with some consequence, like increasing the number of enemies on scattered around different locations or, if you take too many rests, just slapping you with an immediate game over.
When you end up in a fight, you can use assorted resources to convince enemies not to bother fighting you. Fame, which you generally get for being nice, works especially well on guards, while grim, which you generally get for being mean, works especially well on bandits, but you can use either if you have enough of it. Gold works well on both of them, but not so well on cultists, who only respond to grim. Failing that, you can actually kill the bastards, and every foe killed gives you grim. If you reduce enemy morale low enough, whether by bribing or intimidating them or whatever or by violence, surviving enemies run away and you get fame for each one who runs.
That’s a bunch of weird mechanics attached to nifty little decks that help differentiate a cast of characters from one another. Is it fun? Eh. Fun enough that I didn’t mind playing through to the end of the game once to get a bad ending which then sent me back to the beginning for a new game+, but not fun enough that I felt the need to try and get a good ending. The game is all about getting dire visions of the future, and the new game+ starts right after you get the artifact that inflicts the visions, so the idea is that your failed runs are visions of doom from the artifact. I like it when games incorporate failure into the narrative instead of asking you to reload over and over again, slowly crafting a single canon run where the hero never fails out of a dozen or more non-canon failures, but Foretales doesn’t even do that entirely, since any time you get just plain old run out of HP or cards+rests you still just reload.
But more importantly, this setup demands you replay mostly the same game several times, and it’s not nearly enough fun for me to bother with that. Sure, I learned a lot about how to play during my first playthrough and could play much better my second time through, especially in the early quests where they’re quite easy, and there’s different routes through the game so (rough guess) only maybe a third of the quests would be repeats. Like, the cut scene of the bad ending I got ended with a pretty heavy-handed hint that I should immediately start hunting down the doom cult you confront in the final act of the game, ignoring all other concerns, whereas in my initial playthrough those other concerns had seemed sufficiently pressing (friend on death row, guards about to massacre a striking miners’ union) that I never got around to confronting an annoying aristocrat who later on turned out to be a cult leader. So, okay, ignore the other disasters and sprint straight for her.
But I know from the way the quest select screen is laid out that I’m definitely going to be replaying some of these quests because there just aren’t enough empty slots for my second playthrough to be wholly unique, and even if it were, the mechanics were already starting to lose my interest at the end of my first playthrough. It couldn’t be more clear that this game is meant to be played multiple times so this isn’t really complete, but that just means I’m putting it into regrets. I just don’t want to play anymore.
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