Action platformer games can be really fun when done right. The genre is known for fast-paced combat, fun mechanics, and, combined with the right themes and settings, they can turn into popular and memorable titles. On the other hand, the popularity of the genre makes it harder for new titles to stand out against the competition.
Sacre Bleu, developed by Hildring Studio Inc and published by Noodlecake, is an action platformer game set in a light-hearted and whimsical version of the French Revolution. It offers a very exciting and challenging bullet-time movement and combat mechanics that complement the fast-paced action and the speedrunning aspect of the game.
Sacre Bleu starts in the midst of the French Revolution. We play as a musketeer who was framed and thrown into jail, and have to find our way out of La Bastille. A stranger helps us escape from our cell, an inventor and scientist called Josephine. She has a plan to get us both out of there, building a skyship, and she needs our help to get her what she needs in the castle.
The game doesn’t take itself too seriously. The story and the world are fun, fantastical, and satirical, and they fit well with the cartoonish art style. The animations and character designs are quirky and caricaturic, and the environmental designs are varied and unique across the different acts of the game. We explore these visuals listening to familiar music inspired by classic platformer video game soundtracks, and all of these qualities create a great environment to experience the gameplay within.
The gameplay of Sacre Bleu is a combination of 2D action platformer with bullet time action and navigation. Our character’s musket has a very powerful recoil, enough to push us or the enemies around, giving us a very interesting way to interact with the world. There are no double jumps, but we need to use the musket to propel ourselves to unreachable platforms. We can shoot the musket three times before we have to reload and we can’t reload while airborne, so this introduces the limits and challenges in platforming sections. The obstacles and deadly surfaces create elaborate levels where I actually had to pause and look around and strategize how I could get to the next part. The difficulty curve is pretty satisfying; the hardest levels can be completed with a few tries and I never felt stuck. But the sense of challenge and achievement was always there if I wanted to get a higher score or beat my time. There are even some out-of-reach secrets or bonus objectives that I still don’t know how to access, but they won’t stop progression unless you want to complete every achievement in the game.
The combat is a fun addition in most cases. We have the musket to push enemies and projectiles around and use the environment to our advantage, a sword that we can perform a basic or spinning attack with, and we can find ammo for a pistol and grenades throughout each level that we can use in combat. We can also throw enemies and some objects around, use the musket to shoot back enemy projectiles at them. Using all of these different abilities in combat will lead to getting a higher score. You need to alternate between different methods and avoid taking damage to get better combo scores, and these will affect your overall performance score at the end of a level. In addition to seeing shiny and colorful numbers, grades, and competing to get on the leaderboard, getting high scores on multiple levels in each act will unlock an additional level, which gives an extra incentive to use a varried set of skills to defeat enemies. But most importantly, it feels really fun to pull off combos and use all of our skills against enemies.
One of the more anticlimactic moments of Sacre Bleu is the boss “fights”. We learn and experience all these cool mechanics and abilities, but when we get to end of an act or the endgame, the bosses are mostly just platforming challenges. We can’t attack them with our varied arsenal, but have to push down a button to make a big hammer hit them in the head or something to that effect. It is fun, don’t get me wrong. The animations and designs are overly grotesque and amusing, and the platforming challenge is engaging and interesting, but I feel it’s such a missed opportunity to have this exciting combat system and barely use it in the most important parts of the game.
Another slight complaint I have with Sacre Bleu is the mouse and keyboard controls. The default layout is a bit awkward and even though I could fix it, I decided to plug in my PlayStation 5 controller and the game immediately felt so much better. So if you are going to play with a mouse and keyboard, keep in mind that the controls might need some adjustment or getting used to.
Sacre Bleu, with it’s charming characters and whimsical historical setting, smart level design, challenging platforming, and explosive and fun combat and action, was an absolute blast. There are areas where the game felt short, especially during the boss fights, but it still managed engage and excite me for a few hours and I couldn’t put down the controller until I finished the game.
Nima played Sacre Bleu on PC with a provided review copy.
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