Adrien Poncet ⚔️ En Garde!

Très honoré d'apporter ma petite pierre à cet édifice contre le fascisme le week-end prochain !

Et très content de faire revenir une fois encore Adalia pour cette grande cause !

Et comme on dit:
FUCK ICE !

This week I asked my friends if they had a "pirate vybes" game to recommend me. Little I knew that what I needed was En Garde! Not only I get to be a parry god, but I also felt like inside one of Jackie Chan's movies using any stuff in the environment to help me during the fights!

Artwork de Sova

Toujours plus de jeux indés pour 2026 : c'est le 3e épisode de la compilation qui ajoute un nouveau lot d'une vingtaine de titres qui ponctueront l'année !
www.youtube.com/watc...

Partages très appréciés ♥

Lesbian Swordfighting is becoming an actual game genre

Tellement de reviews en si peu de temps c'est ouf aussi !! 😱 Bravo 🪲

NEW GAME ANNOUNCEMENT!
Shadowhand Solitaire is coming very soon to Steam and @itch.io

Please wishlist and share, thank you!
store.steampowered.com/app/3199380/...

We're super proud of this swashbuckling solitaire adventure and we think you'll love it!

Do I hear SWASHBUCKLING??!!! 🤯🥰

I've just published an extended version of my thread on Medium, with better reading experience and lots of extra nerdy info 🤠
Read it here: link.medium.com/oyCn6wyRcOb
Hope you'll like it!

I've just published an extended version of this thread on Medium, with better reading experience and lots of extra nerdy info 🤠
Read it here: link.medium.com/oyCn6wyRcOb
Hope you'll like it!

By the way, regarding my fascination for swashbucklers. Disney’s Aladdin, The Mask of Zorro AND the first Pirates of the Caribbean, 3 movies I can’t stop rambling about... were all written by the same dudes , @tedelliott.bsky.social and Terry Rossio. I guess I should thank them? 😄

Exactement ! C'est de cette réflexion qu'est venue l'idée d'En Garde! à la base 😊

Animated GIFs don't work on Bluesky? Some of the pictures in my thread were supposed to be moving... 😢

Je crois qu'il y a des systèmes de Panache ou équivalent dans tous les jeux du genre 😆 Pour le coup, les JDR de cape et d'épée / mousquetaires sont assez bien représentés ! (il y a aussi 7th Sea...)
C'est vraiment en jeux vidéo que leur rareté est étonnante

Pitié non 😂

Ahah je sais pas ce que ça vaut, j'ai littéralement découvert son existence en cherchant "musketeer game" sur Google 😂

Oh non je connais pas celui là 😮 en JDR français il y a aussi les Lames du Cardinal

Now, you can re-read this whole thread and replace "Musketeer" with "Zorro" - it works too :D

Moreover, new generation of artists are rediscovering the works of Alexandre Dumas. Check out the Dumariolles collective's amazing work!
Maybe one day, some company will finally take a chance to make a proper musketeers video game adaptation. Let's just hope they'll get it right! 24/24

But who knows what the future holds?
There are still movies and TV series being made about the Musketeers, and some video games in adjacent settings (En Garde!, Greedfall, Assassin's Creed Unity...).
'Sacre Bleu' is a promising indie comedy platformer coming soon! 23/24

Since video games tend to stick to mainstream, we do get some great pirate games!
Basically, captain Jack Sparrow killed any chance for d'Artagnan and the boys to star in their own video game. 22/24

Pirate films had always been, initially, a sub-genre of swashbuckler. But in the 2000's, swashbuckling became synonym with pirates.
Pirates became the dominant genre, and in the process, overshadowed all the other old-fashioned fencers in tights. 21/24

According to its authors, The Curse of the Black Pearl was designed from the ground-up as a revival of the classic Swashbuckler formula, with added grittiness and fantastical elements thrown in.
It was a mega-hit, and made pirate stories mainstream again. 20/24

In the early 2000's, and despite Antonio Banderas' best efforts as Zorro, classic Swashbuckler films had fallen out of fashion.

This was until... 2003, when Pirates of the Caribbean came out!

Remember how kids described En Garde! as a "pirate game"? 19/24

Why none of these games ever gets made?
Well, my explanation is that popular video games tend to inspire from mainstream settings. Medieval fantasy, sci-fi, zombies, you name it.
And unfortunately for me, musketeers haven't been mainstream for... a while. 18/24

I've heard about several devs and studios having ideas for a musketeer game, here and there. In a blog post for Playstation, Brian Fleming from Suckerpunch told they considered musketeers as their next game setting, before going for feudal Japan with Ghost of Tsushima. 17/24

So, there's still no proper musketeer game then. En Garde! isn't one. Why isn't anyone else doing it? I've been wondering for years.
Apart from a bunch of obscure abandonware, it's still an unexplored setting. 16/24

En Garde! was made as a melting pot of references. Older generations will "get" the nostalgic swashbuckler feel.
Some younger players have described it as a pirate game - which is fine too!
It also came out right during the Puss in Boots hype 🐱 (Art by @casynuf.bsky.social) 15/24

Initially, I barely knew about all this, I only had some clichés in mind - sword fights, feathered hats, swinging chandeliers... But that's what works so well about En Garde!' concept. You don't need to know. The swashbuckler tropes are rooted in popular imagination. 14/24

We loved the hispanic flair, and the Golden Age Spain setting also felt more original to us than doing French Musketeers - which is ironic, considering my initial thought on the lack of Musketeer video games. 13/24

With En Garde!, we wanted to pay homage to the swashbuckler genre as a whole. We chose to set the game in 17th century Spain, because the genre initially came from here ("comedia de capa y espada" were theater plays from that period). 12/24