Foretales: a two-bit thief decides whether the world is worth saving

The text that carries every card in Foretales has never been written in Portuguese — and the gap splits even the players who champion the game hardest.

A doomsday clock in the hands of a two-bit thief

A curse is tearing the kingdom apart, and the last hope left is Volepain, a two-bit thief carrying more debt than courage. The Spinner placed in her children, the Nymphants, the instruments that can make and unmake worlds — and the player decides whether to help uncover what those children and the cult around them are really planning, or to let it all collapse into the Maelstrom. The doomsday clock is ticking off the hours, and few of them are left.

Cards carry every choice: they guide exploration, drive the turn-based combat and steer the story, which ends differently depending on the path taken. Christophe Héral, the composer behind Rayman and Beyond Good & Evil, wrote the score, and Travis Willingham — the voice from Critical Role and The Legend of Vox Machina — narrates the entire game.

A security warning shut the game down for a few days

On October 7, 2025, the studio Alkemi warned players about a security flaw tied to the Unity engine and advised them not to open the game while a fix was in the works. On October 10 it confirmed that the update solved the problem completely and that playing was safe again.

Four decks telling a single story

A player who spent 113 hours with the game, back in May 2023, describes several decks working as one system: locations that pull the narrative along, skills that set what the characters can do, resources for bargaining or for fighting enemies off, and one more deck for getting spent cards back. That interlocking is what gives the whole thing the feel of a board game rather than a loose pile of cards.

The premise lands fast: a player who had barely started, with 1 hour logged in October 2023, was already talking about wanting to push further into the story. On the other side of the world, someone who missed Armello found a worthy stand-in for it in Foretales, after 8 hours played in September 2026.

That same pull fades after the first run. A Chinese player, 13 hours in as of September 2026, felt it on the second run. Another, with 5 hours that same month, agrees: the first journey grips you, but the characters do not grow from one attempt to the next, and the second and third repeat the same settings and situations — the way out, they say, is to face the repetition with a guide at hand. Someone who dug deeper, 17 hours in September 2026, hit one of the game's harshest endings and, unhappy with the result, kept recommending it anyway: the trouble, for that person, lies in how it ends, not in the road taken to get there.

Priced in reais, not one line in Portuguese

On Steam, where the game sells and where nearly every recorded opinion about it comes from, the sharpest complaint is not about the cards: it is about language. A Brazilian player, after 3 hours in September 2026, objects that a text-driven game sold in the country and billed in reais has never been released in Portuguese — and gave it a thumbs-down over that.

The same irritation had already surfaced in a friendly write-up: someone who played 1 hour in October 2023 backed the game but flagged the missing Portuguese as what weighed hardest against it. A Russian critic, who followed the release for a long stretch and then played 2 hours in September 2026, never got as far as the language question: the card system seemed too simple and the pace too slow, a letdown after such a long wait. In both cases the target is what surrounds the game — the absent translation, the expectation left unmet — and not what the cards do once somebody can read them and play.

For readers of English who like to take their choices slowly

Foretales is for anyone who enjoys adventure told in cards and does not mind reading in English — the language has become grounds for a thumbs-down among players who play in Portuguese and never had another option on screen. It also suits anyone who likes replaying for the path they passed over the first time, since the turn-based combat and the deck exploration carry the story from start to finish.

It is not for anyone who needs Portuguese text to follow a plot: that has never existed here, and the player who raised it took it seriously enough to reject the game on that ground alone. And it is not for anyone expecting the second and third run to deliver the same discovery as the first — those who chased everything the game has to tell found repetition rather than novelty after the first time round.