Entry three and the main characters in our three games so far: an eccentric rich man, a gangster, and now an explorer collecting artifacts in the jungle. Archetypes are already asserting themselves! It’s a relief that Sabre Wulf at doesn’t have any people in that jungle and leaves it as you versus nature.
Sabre Wulf throws its pith-helmeted explorer Sabreman (of course) immediately into a dangerous clearing, assaulted by rapidly materialising snakes and spiders and lots else besides, in a bewildering death carnival. The result is a push to get you quickly moving out of there, a response which will serve you pretty well throughout its course. Keep moving, and keep holding down the fire button, which waggles your sabre. The latter is close to pointless as a control, in fact, in that there are clear advantages to doing so (frequently not dying) but no compensating disadvantages apart from one more finger in use.
That sabre is one of the keys to the distinctiveness of Sabre Wulf. You move up, down left and right in a top-down 2D maze and as long as you are using it to attack you are almost invulnerable from whichever direction you are facing, with one crucial caveat. It only applies when moving left and right. With your character capable of moving all around but incapable of turning 90 degrees, you have no avenue of protection from upscreen or downscreen, making figuring out how to dart from one horizontal corridor to another your main task. Sometimes you’ll get enemies which add another dimension – the hardier wulf of the title; the rhino which charges left to right and you can deflect but not get past; the forest fire which races towards you if you stay in one place for too long.
Or you’ll get different coloured orchids which disappear quickly and serve as power-ups with a whimsical edge: Sabreman changes colour and you might be sped up and invulnerable, but you could also end up stuck to the spot, or having to deal with reversed direction controls.The aspect of frenetic unpredictability added by the random nature of the power-ups and many of the enemies is the other, less strategic, distinctive aspect of Sabre Wulf. It has more elements of computer game as pinball machine, making what inputs you can while lights and sounds and things constantly happen all around. The garish verdanity of the jungle and the bright pink mountains that border it are part of the same spirit. More than the snakes or the fire, it sees the biggest enemy to be vanquished as the possibility of being bored, and sticks a sabre right through it.
