Sacre Bleu Review: A Hilarious Bullet-Time Precision Platformer!?

Sacre Bleu halfway won me over before I even played the thing.  First of all, can I openly acknowledge how great of a title that is?  Given that its meaning is apparently a French expression of surprise, exasperation, or dismay (thank you, Oxford dictionary), there’s no way I can pronounce it with anything less than a gentle shout, and I’m half tempted to say there should have been an exclamation at the end to begin with.  But hey, who am I to tell the devs how to do their jobs?  

This is one of very few games I know of set in the bizarrely underutilized world of Three Musketeers-esque shenanigans, and comes complete with an intro cutscene narrated in a ridiculously thick French accent with lines like “Ze kingdom has been invaded by mercenaries.”  Needless to say, much like the underrated En Garde! from 2023, this game is a good vibe from the moment you lay eyes on it.  

If you don’t like platformers at all, then Sacre Bleu isn’t likely to change your mind.  But rather than exclusively rely on its well-designed but relatively uncomplicated platforming to keep you engaged, Sacre Bleu adds a surprisingly robust combat system that has you dispatching your foes in slow-motion bullet time like a Parisian John Wick.  And while that mix seems like an unusual choice at first, before long it joins the ranks of chocolate and peanut butter or pizza and everything bagel seasoning as an all-time great combination.  Side note: if you haven’t tried everything bagel seasoning on pizza yet, #1: Do it and #2: You’re welcome. 

You play as captain of the Musketeers in a vaguely steampunk alternate history Paris, where you’ve been thrown into prison on false charges and need to escape with the help of your new friend Josephine.  Naturally, as far as prison break stories go, if this was on a vibe scale with 0 being Shawshank Redemption and 10 being the time Spongebob stole a balloon on free balloon day, Sacre Bleu is about an 8.  It’s unapologetically silly, even if the entire narrative is nothing but a transparently thin excuse to send you jumping, shooting, and bullet-time fighting through a wacky variety of guard and trap-filled levels.

That’s not to say the story doesn’t give it a good ole try, but even its more attention-grabbing moments, like the totally unnecessary plot twist, mostly bid for your attention with all the enthusiasm of Ron Swanson hosting a town hall.  It’s cute, I guess, and got a couple of light chuckles out of me, but you won’t be blamed for skipping much of the unnecessary text.  Thankfully, as a game that apparently knows its place, the story is extremely unintrusive.  Even if you choose to watch the opening cutscene, you’ll go from clicking new game to actually playing in less than a minute.  I respect that tremendously and would like Nintendo to take some notes, so honestly can’t ding Sacre Bleu for the flavorless plot.  It’s narrative window dressing at best, letting the charming, colorful, and goofy aesthetic do most of the heavy lifting.

In order to escape prison, you’ll be collecting parts for Josephine to fix up her ship.  Retrieving each one requires traversal of a couple dozen short but creative levels focused on devious platforming challenges and brisk but chaotic combat encounters.  There are three main sets of levels to work your way through in whatever order you want, as well as a bonus 4th set consisting of difficult, bite-sized challenges that might make you scream a few times.  And while the whole thing only lasts about 3 hours in total, hunting for optional collectibles or replaying levels with the game’s wide variety of attainable modifiers can squeeze a couple more hours out of it for those inclined.

Platforming in Sacre Bleu, aside from the basic jump button, is mostly dictated by your Blunderbuss, which to me sounds like the name of a cartoon school bus that makes a lot of mistakes but is trying his best, yet in this specific case means a shotgun-adjacent air gun that will propel you in the opposite direction of each blast.  Usually, that means pointing at the ground to launch yourself upward or shooting at an enemy to get some distance between you, and you can fire up to three shots in midair before needing to land for a recharge.  Rest assured, this limited number of midair trigger pulls is well-exploited by Sacre Bleu’s level design, which frequently gives you limited breathing room when pitted against elaborate, spike-laden death traps, speedy conveyor belts full of spinning saw blades, and all sorts of other stuff even Super Meat Boy would consider a pain in the ass.  There’s no blood splatter here though, so don’t feel afraid to let the kiddos give it a go – this is very much cartoon violence in every sense.  While it can take a minute to get a feel for the ins and outs of the Blunderbuss, the fact that the entire game enters mega slow-motion every time you hold that button to shoot means your reflexes aren’t subject to the pixel-perfection that many precision platformers require.

In fact, arguably one of the greatest qualities of Sacre Bleu is that it manages to be reasonably difficult while making you feel powerful with your eclectic mix of bullet-time enabled skills.  In fact, there are arguably more ways to deal with enemies in Sacre Bleu than there are varieties of enemy combatants themselves.  You can slash at them with your sword, use the Blunderbuss to precisely reflect their own projectiles back at them, pick up a guard and hurl him at another to kill both, or even use grenades or your trusty pistol to spice things up.  Slow-motion deflecting an enemy archer’s arrow back at him while I pick up another enemy to throw at a third enemy’s face never really gets old, even if I feel like there’s not much reason to consistently use the whole move set.  Mixing it up does contribute to your rank and an A in each level is important for unlocking some of the trickier areas of the game, but it’s arguably more important to just… not die.  I consistently got an A rank while forgetting the grenades or pistol even existed, and it’s a shame those tools don’t have their own specific use cases, because it’s easy not to bother with them if you don’t feel like it.

Given how mostly unrestricted combat is, you’d think it would be a total breeze, but that’s not quite the case either.  While I wouldn’t call Sacre Bleu an exceptionally hard game, it does like to throw a lot of different enemies at you at once, forcing your attention in conflicting directions and requiring some split-second decision making.  And while few areas took me more than a couple of tries to get through, the sometimes literally thornier challenges would tend to pop up out of nowhere and suck up 20-30 tries like a greedy little time vampire.  Thankfully, those were few and far between, and most of the game has a smooth difficulty curve that dishes just enough pain to leave its mark.

As mentioned earlier, the game looks great too, with 2D cartoon characters set in brightly colorful 2.5D worlds, and a decent enough variety in levels to make sure none of it ever overstayed its welcome.  It runs great on the Steam Deck too!  And even if the soundtrack isn’t anything to write home about, it fits the game’s vibe as well as it reasonably can.

Most of my issues with Sacre Bleu are pretty minor, but they’re worth a mention and are the type you could easily fix with a couple of patches.  While complaining about a 2D game’s camera seems a little odd, I question some of the choices around its implementation, like the way it’s sometimes zoomed in too far to reasonably see that sawblade up ahead, or the fact that it sometimes just won’t follow your character fast enough to keep up.  Also, there are a handful of bugs present – for example, one in which I got stuck in an area and needed to impale myself on some spikes to respawn and proceed, another where one particular enemy’s attacks don’t seem to work about 25% of the time, and then the various minor typos and grammatical mistakes in what’s already a pretty slim script.

With that being said, the only issue I’d consider large enough to be a dealbreaker for some is the game’s length and overall scope.  At only three hours long, Sacre Bleu is abbreviated enough to come nowhere near outstaying its welcome, and made me wish for some additional levels with new enemy types and ideas to keep the fun going.  But what’s here is still great fun, and a very solid foundation for a follow-up if it’s successful enough to warrant one.  

Future wishes aside though, the quality of Sacre Bleu is impressive for an indie studio’s debut outing.  The platforming feels great, the combat adds a chaotic and heart-thumping variety to each level, and the game is clearly made with love and care, even if it’s over relatively quickly and some aspects could use another coat of polish.

GREAT