Fan Game Showcase – Fearless Night

Today on Fan Game Showcase, we have a brand new fighting game from Shobu Games called Fearless Night. Being developed for Windows and Linux, Fearless Night is a love-letter to Arc System Works’s Guilty Gear series.

Fearless Night plays like Guilty Gear in pretty much every way, right down to the control scheme. It still uses the inverted U layout of Punch, Kick, Slash, Heavy Slash, and Dust, although the Dust button in Fearless Night has been replaced with the O button, which used to stand for Overhead. Now it seems to only stand for a slightly stronger slightly slower attack, but I digress.

Fearless night follows in the footsteps of games like Arcana Heart by featuring a mostly female cast. The characters currently available to play are Uri, a goth girl with a scythe, Poco, a blonde haired girl with gun-tonfa, Hell Princess, a demoness with a sword that she can control with her mind, and Fist, a martial artist that appears to have demons for arms.

Uri is the most basic character. She follows the standard fighting game model of having a fireball, an uppercut, and a few special moves that push her forward while attacking. She’s also the most finished character, sporting the most frames of animation and several sound effects. She plays well enough. Her attacks chain as you would expect them to, from weakest to strongest. Using cancels can allow her to rack up some astounding damage, and she has decent mobility once you cover her movement with a projectile.

Every other character is, sadly, very unfinished. Only key frames of animation have been included, which makes it hard to tell how fast or powerful a character is going to be. Poco’s big draw is her mobility. She has the ability to hover and has ninja style rush attacks. She too has projectiles, although hers either fire on a delay or stick around to control space on the screen. Hell Princess is a shadow character whose unique trait is the ability to telekentically control her sword. Under normal circumstances, the sword simply follows her movement. However, certain attacks throw it across the screen and cause it to act independently from her. She kind of plays like Litchi Faye-Ling from Blazblue. Finally, Fist is a pretty straight forward stance character. His special moves cause him to get into stances from which other moves are performed. Staying in the stance longer causes him to charge up energy and makes his special moves stronger.

Fearless Night is looking to make special techniques, like Guilty Gear style Forced Roman Cancels, much easier for newbies. The cancel window isn’t much bigger than Guilty Gear’s, but there is a cancel buffer that makes things slightly easier. Essentially, this means if you are pushing buttons too quickly you will still cancel out of your moves at the first possible moment. It reduces the need to rely on timing and makes high-level gameplay more inviting for newbies.

An Alpha Demo of Fearless Night is currently available to download off the Shobu Games homepage. Note, that this isn’t the same as, say, the Minecraft demo. It is still very much unfinished and is littered with bugs. Nonetheless, it has a working versus and training mode, which is all you need to try the interesting roster of characters out.