Stop and think

Quick reflexes and brute strength will only get you so far in the brawls ofForestrike.

As the fighty boy of RPS, I’ve had a go.

It’s quite the satisfying little bruiser.

The player delivers a final kick to the last enemy in a monastery.

Imagine if someone demadeSifuwith retro graphics and wisdomously advised you that the brain hits harder than the hand.

The hook is compelling.

Eventually you see the best approach.

Cover image for YouTube video

But this is only practice mode.

Lose all your meagre health pips in the real thing and it’s the end of a run.

It’s often better to let your enemies hit one another by mistake than to throw a punch yourself.

The player chooses from three skills, as the figure of his Leaf master watches on.

Some of this feels down to slight variations during a brawl.

It’s not the cleverest or the most efficient way to earn a win.

But sometimes you just need to scrape through and improvise.

The player revives next to a red gate with a crescent towering over it.

you’ve got the option to practice something dozens of times, and you might still fuck up.

This is true in life.

But when the pressure is on, under testing conditions for example, they suddenly fluff it.

Three goons face the player on a flat plain, with hills rolling in the background.

Chess grandmasters make obvious blunders in critical matches.

Theatre actors suddenly draw a blank on lines they’ve delivered hundreds of times.

It’s a counterintuitive truth of skill: you are sometimes better at things when you don’t trytoohard.

Enemies surround the hero on a bridge amid mist-covered rocks.

And it sometimes worked in my favour, simply because I wasn’t overthinking.

Uh, then again, I did sometimes get swiftly slam dunked into the dirt.

My point is: it’s neat.

The player fights some thugs outside a closed gate under an overcast sky.

Like I say,the demo is on Steam.