ForeTales puts a wonderful spin on traditional card games – Review

Guest review by Ryan Byers

Obscure Games and Consoles

ForeTales from Alkemi Games and Dear Villagers is a game that blends a wonderful narrative story and unique gameplay that keeps you engaged and entertained throughout the adventure. Blending the narrative story with Gameplay reminiscent of games like Magic The Gathering but doesn’t focus heavily on deck building or deck customization. Rather it instead uses the card deck system as a way to provide choices in dialogue, locations to visit, characters you meet, and overall is the way the game is presented.

Gameplay:

Everything is set up on a table-like setting with cards designating everything from locations to items, NPCs and your party members. The center of the table will usually consist of an NPC or set of NPCs, and a location you can visit. The left side of the playfield consists of an explore deck which houses cards that offer locations, quests and encounters. The right side of the playfield consists of the rest deck which can be used to recover skill cards for your party members. The bottom of the playfield consists of the party members, each member’s skill cards and your item cards. As you progress through the game and make choices you can shape the way the game world perceives your party members and shapes the outcome of the game as a whole.

For instance, in one of the first quests, you have to get enough food from the market to continue on the main journey to help your father. You have the option to either purchase the food from the vendor by gathering enough money through talking to the innkeeper and/or selling item cards, or you could steal it from the market vendor. Your choices ultimately shape how the NPCs and even your fellow adventurers treat you.

Graphics:

Graphically speaking, the game looks really good. The 2D animated look of each of the cards is very detailed. The subtle animations of characters with expressions and gestures make the cards come alive and make the game feel less like a mundane card game and more like the story-driven adventure that it is. When a character is speaking, you will have a character portrait of them pop up with the dialogue box giving a sense of the cards coming to life. The dialogue boxes don’t feel like they’re in the way and instead sit low on the playfield and are either a light brown color or monochrome white text on a dark black text box.

Audio:
The in-game music and environmental sound effects make the game feel like a grand adventure that doesn’t overstay their welcome. It instead is used to help drive the importance of dialogue choices, intensify battles, or help bring locations to life rather than having them feel static.
For example, you can head into the market and hear people bustling about in the crowded streets. Or maybe you head off into the woods and you can hear birds chirping above you. Though I wish that the entire game was voice acted with less reading, I do appreciate the narrator helping to set up scenes and highlighting things like characters’ feelings. He sounds like an old soul, warm and inviting, making listening to him that much more enjoyable.

Conclusion:

This game is not the game I was expecting it to be at all. I was expecting a game similar to that of Magic the Gathering or a similar experience from the images that I saw on the eshop page. What you actually get is a unique blend of Magic The Gathering and Black and White. What I mean by this is that the game is offering you a card game experience with the requirements of making choices that affect how the game world reacts to the moral choices that you choose to make. The strong emphasis on the story, the warm inviting nature of the narrator, the way the game is set up, the choices you make, everything
about this game is just an absolute joy to play and experience.

If you’re looking for just another deck-building game that has you mindlessly fighting foes, this game isn’t for you and I suggest looking at other games on the platform of your choice. If you’re wanting a game that plays dynamically based on the moral choices you make, has a strong emphasis on the story, and is not only a card game but a grand adventure; you owe it to yourself to pick up this game and give it a chance.

Disclaimer: A review key was provided