Foretales

My first thought sitting down with Foretales was that someone finally made the digital equivalent of spreading cards across a kitchen table and letting the story sort itself out. You play as Volepain, a shoebill thief who grabs a cursed lyre on a routine job and immediately starts seeing apocalyptic visions, and from there you are assembling a party of anthropomorphic companions - tiger archer Leo, gorilla brawler Karst, parrot Pattenbois, elephant Isabeau - and working through a branching web of missions before countdown timers force the story forward. The framing device is clever: those red-stamped countdown cards mean you simply cannot do everything in one run, so every playthrough demands different priorities and produces a different shape of story. The card system itself is the real hook, and it is worth being precise about what kind of card game this actually is. Forget Slay the Spire or any deckbuilder where you grind for better cards. Foretales uses two card types - skill cards tied to each party member and consumable resource cards - played against location cards laid out on a board. Interactions are contextual: Volepain's Nimble Hands card used on a Merchant card produces a different outcome than paying with Gold, which produces a different outcome than siccing Karst on them outright. Killing too many enemies raises your Infamy and bleeds into both dialogue and future mission availability, so the game quietly nudges you toward creative, non-violent solutions. At its best, in sequences like a mid-game courtroom scene where you collect alibi cards to defend a pirate on a murder charge, it genuinely feels like a Lucasarts adventure translated into cardboard logic. Where it loses people is the narrowness of character kits and the repetition of location cards. Each companion starts with roughly half a dozen unique cards and barely grows from there - hidden objectives can unlock one or two new cards per character, but the decks never get truly deep. Critics and players both flagged that the same few solutions tend to work across most missions, and the early chapters in particular lean heavily on the same forest and town locations before the world opens up. Combat, when it is forced on you, is the weakest part: it collapses into who can heal fastest and rarely asks for interesting decisions. The game is at its sharpest when you are puzzling out how to bribe, sneak, or talk your way through something rather than fighting through it. The presentation, though, is genuinely lovely throughout - a Disney Robin Hood-ish aesthetic with clean character art, a warm narrator voiced by Travis Willingham, and a soundtrack from Christophe Heral of Beyond Good and Evil fame that does real atmospheric work. The Steam community sits at 85 percent positive across over a thousand reviews, which tracks with my read: this is a game that lands well for players who tune into its specific frequency and frustrates those who expect mechanical depth to match the narrative ambition. It is also a legitimately short game for a first run - a few hours - which makes the repetition sting more on replays than it might in a longer experience. New Game Plus unlocks additional branch options, and the multiple endings give determined players real reasons to go back, but how much mileage you get out of those revisits depends entirely on your tolerance for seeing familiar missions from a new angle with a slightly different card hand. Go in wanting a cozy, story-first tabletop experience with light puzzle logic, and Foretales delivers that confidently. Go in wanting a card game that rewards mechanical mastery, and you will be packing up early.

Alex · Scout Team

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