(Warning: fairly major plot and structural spoilers follow for a game that really does not want to be spoiled at first glance.)
Foretales was not the game that I expected it to be at first.
The developers call it a narrative-based adventure where your choices matter and have consequences. The narrative expresses itself through digital cards, which is not normally a play style I gravitate to, but it wasn’t long before I found the interface perfectly intuitive. Your progression through the world is handled by sorting through decks of cards and playing various skill or item cards on other cards to cause a desired effect. I promise it’s far more immersive than I’m making it sound; once you really get into it, there are whole worlds in here between the shuffling decks. If you enjoy medieval fantasy (and/or the furry/anthro aesthetic) but the idea of a digital card game is making you purse your lips and scratch your chin, I urge you to give Foretales a chance.
The combat has RPG flavours to it but with enough player control over the terms of the confrontation that you can resolve, dare I say, most combat encounters without bloodshed if you’re canny with your resources. Don’t expect to be able to pull off some Undertale pacifist run here – there are things you will absolutely have to fight and kill, living or otherwise – but you’re encouraged to think your way around fighting a lot of the time.
Combat itself is…functional, there are layers to it in some ways but it’s also a bit basic in other ways. (For example, there’s no option to not attack on a given turn, say, to get one party member to hunker down and boost defense without attacking for a turn, which is an option so many turn-based RPGs have and you don’t miss it until it’s gone – it sure would make a certain puzzle-boss in the endgame much easier.) You’re very much intended to use the tools at your disposal to not leave a Kratos-esque body count behind you. Their combat mechanics work just fine for the kind of game this actually is.
So after getting over the hump that was the unfamiliar interface, I became immersed in the story, and I played on, making whatever choices I thought were best in the moment, not expecting the best ending, but at least making enough decent choices to net me a fair outcome.
I then got an ending so bad that it wasn’t an ending. It was a ‘cut you off before the climax, go back to page 1 and try again’ kind of ending. That choice of words is deliberate on my part, because at that point I was feeling the best comparison I could make to Foretales is a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Which is in itself a neat concept! I gobbled up CYOA books as a kid. I feel it.
But the reason I’m writing this instead of chalking it up as one of the many great games that surprised me, came next.
After the end of the world, our young shoebill protagonist Volepain awakens in the same forest he began in after the tutorial. For a second I thought, damn, that’s rough, gotta go through New Game Plus to try and do better.
Then I realized the plot was still going, with Volepain retaining his memories of everything that transpired previously, and that was when I realized that the thing we assume at first to be New Game Plus is not. Moreover, this is not the simple choose-your-own-adventure narrative that it marketed itself as.
That’s when I realized Foretales was something special – a game that doesn’t even reveal its true genre to you until the point where you think you’ve beaten it. Fittingly enough for the card-game motif, that is a hell of a sleight of hand.
We are in a time loop, and we have previous little time in which to save the world. How much can one shoebill take?
It’s tempting to look back at this game at long sight, but I need to put you in my shoes as I first experienced this game. Slowly, I groped through the haze of not knowing what the right choices were. Chapters that I brilliantly deduced early in this second loop as red herrings turned out to be absolutely crucial. Events I thought pivotal would ultimately not be. The second loop onwards allows you to rewind and redo chapters, an anti-frustration feature if you’re sure you’ve made the wrong choice, but how do you know you’re not making the wrong choice by taking a different path?
As I was playing loop after loop, the deeper I got into it, I was struck by how effectively Foretales turns not just Volepain, but you, the player, into the kind of protagonist we see in Groundhog Day and Edge Of Tomorrow. On successive loops you blaze through early chapters like you’re center stage at Games Done Quick; in-universe, Volepain already knows the guards’ rotations, what different characters will say and do and want and when, and the ideal path to get things done, and the game grooms the player extremely effectively until the way you’re playing the game reflects that.
In hindsight, the game’s structure fascinates me. I believe you need at least three loops to obtain the best ending (it took me four), because Volepain retains important knowledge from previous loops: for example, finding the cure to the Beastilence takes Volepain and herbalist lemur Sylvia on a hell of a sidestep to an ancient library, which takes up precious time and makes you unable to save the world on that loop. But you only need to complete The Forbidden Library chapter on that one loop, because Volepain just remembers the information for next time.
For the major catastrophic events – the sacking of cities you’re trying to get through, for example, and the maelstrom that will wipe out the world – are all set on a global timer that ticks down after every chapter you finish. At long sight, Foretales’ successive loops are jigsaw pieces inside a much larger puzzle: how can you do everything you need to do in time to avert the apocalypse?
One of your loops will involve joining the batshit crazy death cult run by a batshit crazy bat lady. It nets you a certain Bad End, but it’s required because you gain information by being on the inside of the cult that you can then leverage into later loops. I really dragged my heels on doing what amounts to a hard Renegade run by joining the cult, because they’re all kinds of screwed up and gross, but actually making you do a darkside run as part of the main narrative is actually something super neat that you don’t tend to see with all time loop stories.
All of it makes me think about how time loop narratives actually function: repetition as reinforcement, repetition as progression. Foretales’ easy-to-understand mechanics feel satisfying to repeatedly perform and its chapter objectives feel sprawling and tricksy at first blush, but on repeated loops you can blast through them because you know exactly what you’re doing. Later loops start to feel like those montages in time-loop movies where they quickly smash-cut through elements of the protagonist’s endlessly looping day that we’ve seen before. And I mean that in the best possible way! The developers understand how time loop stories work, down to their molecules, and have integrated this understanding into the design of their game terrifically.
It’s the kind of game that can hold your interest just by scrolling through your inventory and seeing what cards have different effects on a given location, with numerous ways in which to solve every scenario. If you have a firebomb in your inventory, you get to see just how many things you can use it on (for Grim points and various items) if you’ve decided that your Volepain is going through an existential crisis from repeated loops and no longer sees any living things around him as anything more than transient shadows on his way to the next loop: a populated inn, that peaceful sloth herbalist in the woods, that gaggle of smiling street kids, jesus fucking christ Volepain. (So the Switch has an E10+ rated game where you can immolate children, so, bask in that.)
After you’ve done several loops – presumably at least two loops, one of which being the cultist arc, the mysterious figure who’s been narrating Volepain’s journey reveals he’s more than he lets on, and he joins as a party member from then on (unless you do the cult stuff again, but you no longer need to by the time he joins). This is really interesting, because Noctomoth is the kind of party member you’d expect a game like this to give you in NG+: he has armour like the Death Star, he can use Jedi mind tricks both to skip some events and to lower enemy mobs’ morale in battle at twice the rate of other items/skills that do so, he can create quantum tunnels to skip you ahead in a region at your leisure, and he can reach into the void between dimensions and pull out plot-crucial items that streamline your journey significantly because you don’t have to go the long way round to acquire them.
But at the same time, his joining the party is part of standard plot progression and treated as such. It’s just one more really cool way the game both subverts and deconstructs the whole idea of NG+ through its time loop narrative. Mechanically, he’s clearly a way to give the player a quicker and easier route through the chapters they’ve already played, committing to the time loop while at the same time working in an anti-frustration feature.
This is definitely the kind of game that’s more than the sum of its parts. During the several weeks I sunk into feeling through the game’s loops and plot paths, I was narrating and describing the journey on Discord to a group of friends, and toward the end of it they admitted they completely forgot I was describing a digital card game, instead imagining some epic animated movie in their heads, something playing and looking more like Tails Of Iron or, and I quote one of them, ‘my own edgy little Redwall cartoon’, and it took my posting a screencap of one of the cards to snap them back to the realization that this super-involved epic story was being expressed through digital cards. Can we agree that’s awesome? The devs should be proud of themselves.
There are still elements of the game I haven’t seen. I still don’t know what will happen if you actually do play with an emphasis on combat, which the game warns you will have consequences; fighting is typically a last resort for me simply because bribing or intimidating enemies away generally gets you more resources with less drawback (IE, no having to constantly re-up on health items after combat and receiving Fame points for every enemy who survives an encounter – points which you can turn right around and use to scare off enemies in the next encounter). I do wonder what consequences a grimdark killer run would have, because the game clearly choreographs that you will be consequenced.
In fact, while experimenting with the routing, on one loop I let Volepain’s father get killed because I thought maybe that was a sacrifice you might have to make for the sake of time. The result: Volepain deciding that if the world would be this cruel and cold, then so would he, and he rebrands then and there as a relentless assassin. His character card changes to hide his eyes under the hood, he gains an extra attack point, he gets some new, more renegade skill cards (the standard looting card is replaced by one where you hold a knife to their throat and threaten their life) and jesus I thought I was doing the right thing for the greater good I didn’t ask for this so I used the quantum rewind to make it go away. Now I kind of wish I had seen that through just to be able to talk about it, but that’s clearly the route to go if you do want to run a murder-heavy loop given the extra attack point. (Edit from a subsequent playthrough: wow, you really have to try to get Volepain’s father killed. I don’t even remember how I managed it that one time, because I actively tried, and failed, to set that event in motion on multiple loops to see all this. Getting Peter killed takes “sabotage the genophage cure then kill Mordin to cover it up then kill Wrex to cover that up” levels of malevolent incompetence.)
Maybe my fondness for this game stems in part from how weird and refreshing it feels to go into something in this day and age as blind as you can reasonably be. I will admit one or two puzzles stumped me so fiercely that I resorted to Youtube – and found nothing that would help me. As of when I played, this game has a bit of a scarce resource meta: seeking it on Youtube brought you some pre-release promo, some reviews, an incomplete English Let’s Play and a complete French one. So the only way to do it was to do it. Wriggling through the puzzles and figuring things out without even the option and thus the temptation of looking things up made me think about how players of those super-early adventure games pre-internet must have felt.
But aside from that, there’s an undeniable charm that bursts from this game’s every seam – or, I should say every deck.
Now that we’re about wrapping up, here’s where you should stop reading if you have even a passing interest in playing Foretales, because I’m about to tell you exactly what you need to do to obtain the best ending.
Again, if you want to play this game, stop reading for your own sake. I’m writing all this down because I’m proud of myself for figuring it out. I want my gold star.
No, really! Stop! Part of the thrill is working your way to the perfect run!
Right, I see you shan’t be dissuaded, so here we go.
This will have to be on your third loop at the very least, assuming you did everything you needed to in the first two loops. From reawakening: you need to skip the first chapter where you jailbreak Leo. The answer as to why will be crucial later, but this is the other big trick the game pulls on you, pulling at your heartstrings with the fact that Leo is Volepain’s bestie and the game effectively conditions you to see Leo as ‘the de facto starting companion’. You have to leave him and let him get transferred. You need that extra chapter’s worth of breathing room. And they made Leo a great companion mechanically, too: he has tons of useful skills, and the early chapters contain several events that only trigger if Leo is there, which earn him extra skill cards; to put it simply, the game acts like he’s always meant to be there and, once again, this is a sleight of hand. Leave him be. Unfortunately in addition to losing out on Leo’s fantastic skillset, this also means missing out on Volepain’s Cutpurse ability, which is like his standard looting skill but better in every way, which you gain in the chapter where you rescue Leo.
(If I can get analytical for a second, this is also pretty brilliant. Leaving Leo goes against every impulse you probably have, both mechanically and emotionally, and it might take a few loops for you to realize that the only way to win later, is to lose early. It’s like the dramatic snap realization that a time loop protagonist has in the final act of the movie that leads them to breaking the loop and/or saving the world. Like I said, this game grooms you as a player in some pretty brilliant ways to think like a time loop protagonist.)
Go to The Strike Leader and immediately have Noctomoth reach into the void and grab you an extra Laissez-Passer to give to the frog trader guy in exchange for the location of the forger. Go through the chapter and recruit Karst.
Go to The Negotiator and use the location of the forger at your earliest convenience to meet up with her. Give her the lyre and she’ll make a copy. Go through the chapter, recruit Isabeau, and give the fake lyre to Lady Katell. You will have already gone through the cult arc in a previous loop, and Noctomoth will explain that you have all you need from them now that you’ve tricked Lady Katell.
Go to Rescue, save Peter, save the other miners if you’re so inclined, venture into the Hellmouth and break down the wall and obtain the accursed artifact behind it (having Nocto reach into the void and grab you some dynamite makes this effortless), because Volepain already knows its location from having done the cultist arc on a previous loop.
Play through Escape. Not much to say here, I don’t think you can make any choices here that knock you off the route to the best ending.
Play through The Advocate, free and recruit Pattenbois.
At this point you’re given a choice between The Bladesmith Alliance and The Herbalist. This took me a bit to figure out. Volepain receives a prophecy that Isabeau will be assassinated, and the key to preventing that as quickly as possible is in the Bladesmith chapter. But you need every party member present for the best end, so you need to recruit Sylvia in The Herbalist. You don’t have time to do both if you spent a chapter rescuing Leo. This is why you have to leave him: by giving yourself that extra chapter of breathing room, you can do this:
Play through The Herbalist and recruit Sylvia. Because you already did The Forbidden Library on a previous loop, Volepain remembers the cure to the Beastilence and doesn’t need to go there again.
Play through The Blockade, choose to attack Inkblood head on, and kill him. Because he’s the one who kills Isabeau if the prophecy comes to pass, that dilemma is solved.
At that point, you’ll re-acquire Leo in the penultimate chapter where you also get Aube, so you’ll have everyone, which is the condition for the best ending; in the same chapter, make sure to cure Volepain’s Beastilence infection with the remedy you found, because I believe that’s the only chapter in this loop where you’re able to find the ingredients and do it, either with the cook or by bringing Sylvia along. After all that, just go on and beat the game. And feel slightly less good about it because you got it from here instead of slowly sussing it out yourself, I suppose?
Also, if you found this by googling “how to get best ending Foretales”, hi!
I played Foretales on the Switch and you can too.