Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves

Overview

In 1850s Canada, the Devil came a-callin' for Josephine O'Carroll. He underestimated her brothers' tenacity, though. For 20 days, he sent his minions after them. For 20 nights, Joseph & Jacques O'Carroll fought off werewolves, wendigos, and worse with traps, rifles, and booze. Play as one of the O'Carroll brothers and save your sister through cunning & courage.

Gameplay

Sang-Froid plays like the love child of Orcs Must Die! and Rainbow Six. Each day starts with a Planning Phase where you view the enemies' waves & paths, set traps, buy supplies, and spend skill points. When night falls, you dart around cutting off enemies, setting off your traps, and killing the survivors. It is technically not a "tower defence" game, though admittedly the differences are mostly semantic; you do not funnel giant waves of enemies into a growing Corridor of Death, the waves are small (usually 4-12 enemies per wave), they starts in different locations & target different structures, and your traps are consumed after one use. Thus, you need to craft custom strategies for each wave. You can't place new traps between waves, either; what you set before the fighting starts is all you get.

Combat is almost as methodical as the planning. It takes several seconds to reload your rifle, and melee attacks drain your Stamina meter, forcing you to catch your breath after several swings. This is where your Fear Factor comes into play: enemies will hesitate and circle you (instead of attacking) if they're scared of you. The game will count down how long you have before their next attack. Successful attacks, shouting, and bonfires all increase your Fear Factor, buying you time to recover your Stamina or shoot them.

Weapons

You have an axe for melee combat and a rifle for ranged combat. Both can be upgraded in town. Wading into packs of wolves to kill them personally isn't recommended, though: axe swings quickly drain your Stamina, and rifles have to be reloaded after each shot. Many enemies are resistant to normal weapons, too; you can buy Holy or Silver weapons to bypass those resistances.

Traps

Traps are your best way of killing large groups of enemies at once or killing tough enemies really fast. Traps need to be placed during the Planning Phase and are expended after one use. Although some traps work better on certain enemies than others, even resistant enemies take full damage from traps (except for those blasted will-o-the-wisps).

• Wolf Traps: Automatically snap on any enemy that enters their radius. Wolves & grand wolves are instantly killed; anything else (except will-o-the-wisps) takes some damage and is immobilized for a couple seconds.
• Spike Traps: Automatically spring when more than 3 enemies are on them, impaling them all. Instantly kills everything but grand werewolves, wendigos, and those pesky will-o-the-wisps.
• Bait: Most enemies stop to eat it, luring them into traps or delaying them. If you have the right skills, it also poisons them for light damage.
• Watchtowers & Ziplines: Get from Point A to Point B extremely quickly; you can even snipe enemies from them. They can be used as much as you want and are permanent until a beast tears them down.
• Bonfire: Increases your Fear Factor while you stand near it, delaying enemies' attacks.
• Fire Walls: Enemies (except for will-o-the-wisps) will refuse to cross these unless they have to, taking an alternate route if one's available. Useful for rerouting enemies into traps, towards you, or just delaying their assault.
• Hanging Net Trap: Shoot it to drop a ton of rocks and damage everyone beneath it.
• Ballista: Shoots a giant bolt that does heavy damage. Instantly kills anything short of a wendigo. (It can even one-shot them if you have the Ballista skill.)
• Exploding Barrel: Blows up everything around it. You can either shoot it or light the fuse and run away.
• Mortar: Aim it during the Planning Phase, then manually fire it to blow up everyone in the target zone from a distance.
• Wayside Cross: It slowly burns any diabolic beasts around it. Useful for killing groups of will-o-the-wisps, who are immune to nearly everything else.
• Spirit Tree: It shoots a limited number of spiritual bolts at any enemies that approach it. It does more damage to mystical enemies.

Enemies

Enemies can be roughly divided into 3 categories, depending on what they're vulnerable to:

• Wolves, Grand Wolves: Vulnerable to everything, easily taken out by wolf traps or a few swings of your axe.
• Werewolves, Grand Werewolves, Will-o-the-Wisps: Diabolic beasts, resistant to everything but holy weapons. Werewolves & grand werewolves will fall for the same traps that wolves do, but will-o-the-wisps are immune to most traps (even passing through fire walls unless you have the proper skill), requiring you to take them out personally.
• Maikan Warriors, Maikan Shamans, Wendigos: Mystical beasts, resistant to everything but silver weapons. While werewolves are mindless beasts of the Devil, the Maikan are intelligent shapeshifters (taking the form of bipedal wolves) that don't like you on their land. They ignore bait, which makes it harder to take them out with traps, and their shamans cast spells at you. The wendigos are the toughest enemies in the game (aside from the final boss) and can also freeze you with their breath.