Forestrike

A studio that already reinvented one genre trying its hand at another

Forestrike is developed by Kyoto-based Skeleton Crew Studio alongside Thomas Olsson, published by Devolver Digital, and released 17 November 2025. It's the studio's first release since 2021's Olija, a well-regarded action-adventure that established Skeleton Crew as a team willing to build entire games around a single distinctive mechanical idea rather than assembling genre conventions. Forestrike follows the same instinct: players take on Yu, a martial artist journeying across a fantastical, East Asian-inspired setting to free an Emperor from a scheming Admiral's influence, learning techniques from five distinct fighting schools along the way. What sets the combat apart is its central "Foresight" mechanic — before any real encounter, players can enter Yu's mind and rehearse the fight as many times as they like, experimenting freely and without consequence, before committing to a single "for real" attempt where every timing and decision from that rehearsal has to hold up under actual pressure.

Turning save-scumming into the entire design

The praise that dominates Forestrike's review corpus centres almost entirely on how well that central idea works in practice. One detailed review frames it precisely: players who've always enjoyed methodically solving encounters in games like XCOM or Baldur's Gate 3, but felt a quiet stigma around "save-scumming" to get there, find that instinct fully validated here, since rehearsal is the explicit, celebrated core of the design rather than a workaround. Reviewers repeatedly describe individual encounters functioning as much like puzzles as fights, rewarding players who methodically learn enemy routines and internalise a winning sequence rather than relying on raw reflexes — several specifically credit the game with letting them re-engage with precision action after feeling like they'd aged out of reflex-heavy titles like Elden Ring or Hollow Knight: Silksong. The comparisons reviewers reach for are telling: Katana Zero's rhythm of death, retry and eventual mastery, Shogun Showdown's tactical structure, and Hades' narrative-driven roguelite progression, blended into something reviewers largely agree feels genuinely distinct from any one of them. Handcrafted pixel art and animation draw consistent, specific praise for atmosphere, and the story's East Asian martial-arts film framing — secret techniques, rival schools, inscrutable masters — is credited by multiple reviewers as told with real affection rather than surface-level pastiche.

The friction between deaths, and after them

Set against that praise, a specific and repeated complaint concerns what happens immediately after a failed attempt. Because Forestrike's foresight rehearsals carry no real stakes, the actual moment of consequence is concentrated entirely into the single "for real" attempt — and when that attempt fails, several reviewers describe being funnelled through a lengthy, already-seen dialogue sequence before they can try again, with no quick-restart option to skip past material they've already sat through multiple times in the same session. One detailed critical review specifically calls out four compounding issues along these lines, arguing the amount of downtime between a failure and the next attempt actively discourages paying attention to the story and characters the sequence is meant to be delivering, since players have already seen it and are mainly waiting to get back to the fight. A related, more structural complaint concerns the roguelite framing itself: at least one reviewer argues the genre's usual promise — that even a failed run leaves you meaningfully stronger for the next one — doesn't hold up as well here, describing failure as a flat, discouraging reset rather than forward motion, a complaint that cuts at the roguelite label the game markets itself under rather than the foresight mechanic specifically.

Difficulty that divides even its fans

A smaller, more personal thread of criticism concerns difficulty itself. Several reviewers who otherwise recommend the game enthusiastically still flag specific fighting schools or late encounters as excessively difficult, with one detailed, generally positive review singling out the "Leaf" style as a genuine outlier in difficulty compared to techniques that clicked on a first serious attempt. A smaller number of reviewers frame the entire loop more bluntly and less charitably, describing it as a "do it until you get it right" simulator dressed up in puzzle-game trappings — a framing that isn't necessarily wrong, but lands very differently depending on how much a given player enjoys deliberate, iterative trial and error as a core gameplay loop rather than a fallback.

Sharing the hardest fights

One practical feature worth dwelling on, because it speaks directly to the difficulty complaints above, is Forestrike's battle-code system: players who solve a particularly tough encounter can generate a code representing their exact winning sequence and share it, letting other players load that specific solution and study or replicate it rather than being permanently stuck. It's a small, specific design choice that acknowledges the game's own hardest content can tip from satisfying into genuinely unfair for some players, and gives the community a built-in way to help each other past those walls without needing a developer patch or external guide. That instinct — building a safety valve directly into a deliberately unforgiving system rather than simply lowering the difficulty for everyone — fits the same design philosophy that made Olija distinctive: a small, focused idea, carried through with enough conviction that the rough edges around it read as consequences of that focus rather than oversights.

Value

At NZ$14.99, Forestrike draws consistent, specific praise as excellent value, with more than one reviewer explicitly stating they'd have paid twice the asking price for the amount of depth, replayability across five distinct fighting schools, and polish on display. The Very Positive score — 920 positive against 80 negative across 1,000 reviews — reflects a review base that has, on balance, judged the foresight mechanic's genuine originality worth tolerating its rougher edges around death-loop pacing and roguelite structure. For players drawn to precision, puzzle-like combat and willing to accept a slower rhythm between failed attempts, Forestrike is close to an easy recommendation at its price; for players who specifically want a roguelite's sense of forward momentum on every run regardless of outcome, the structural complaints raised by its own detailed critical reviews are worth weighing first.