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Game Short Description

Hellish Quart is a fighting game about one-on-one sword dueling, in which the blades block each other using physics, and the characters use motion-captured historical fencing techniques. Players fight as 17th-century warriors: Cossacks, Hussars, Janissaries, Highlanders, Tatars, and use sabers, rapiers, broadswords, longswords, and many other blades. The game is a love letter to ever more popular Historical European Martial Arts (also known as HEMA).

Hellish Quart is an indie game created by a team of just two developers and is now released on Steam Early Access. Currently, it includes a single-player and local multiplayer mode, but you can play online too, using Steam Remote Play Together (https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay) or Parsec.

More about the game

Hellish Quart is a spiritual successor to games like Bushido Blade or Kengo, but with a European twist. The main feature of the game is that the swords actually physically clash and block each other, using the game engine’s physics simulation. There are no visible health bars and, like in the aforementioned games, fighters can be killed by a single, well-timed, and measured attack.

The controls

The view and controls are very similar to a regular 3D fighting game. Players walk with the gamepad’s left stick or a d-pad and the four gamepad buttons represent 4 attack angles. Different button combinations give special attacks and combos. If you are not attacking, your character will automatically try to hold guard against your opponent's attacks. “Try”, because the characters, when blocking, are not invulnerable, like in other games. The only thing that is stopping the opponent’s blade to cut into them, is their own, physical blade, that’s in the way.

The looks

The gameplay looks and feels like a real HEMA duel, which you can see on YouTube. There are no Hollywood-style, flashy, but unrealistic moves. This is because all animations in the game are recorded by HEMA practitioners, using motion capture. Jakub Kisiel, the head developer of the game, is a mocap artist that formerly worked on games like Bulletstorm and The Witcher III and is a lifetime sword fighting enthusiast.

The Setting

Hellish Quart happens in a historical, realistic setting. The game takes place in 17th century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. This place and time is a wonderful mix of cultures and races, constant wars, battles, and duels. It is also a period in which the swords reached their peak in variety and specialization. All this allows for a really varied character roster. You will duel Zaporozhian Cossacks, Polish Hussars, Tatars, Turkish Janissaries, Swedish Reiters, French Musketeers, and more. You will use sabers, palaches, basket hilt swords, rapiers, and even an ancient german longsword.

The graphics

The character models are made from 3D scanned, real, historical reconstruction clothes. To do that, the developers use photogrammetry - it’s a scanning technique, where multiple photos of a piece of clothing are taken from every possible angle. Then, the scanning software can reconstruct the scanned piece in 3D space.

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