Every trap, platform or bonfire you place, in fact, eats away at the vanishingly small amount of money you have to spend on better gear for yourself - manage to scrape together $10 in Sang-Froid and you're like a king.

The holdings you need to defend are scattered across huge areas, which you either need to slowly sprint between or spend precious money on ziplines to reach them at speed. Most of the enemies you face will be almost completely resistant to whatever weapons you've decided to take with you. Your rifle takes up to ten terrifying seconds to reload. You've only a handful of traps, all of which are used up if activated just once. Making it through a level feels desperate and stressful rather than indulgently genocidal. You play as one of two bearded, bickering brothers (the burly one means Normal difficulty, the skinny one means Hard) who barely have anything other than sticks, stones, rope and their inadvertently fashionable checked shirts to defend their family and friends from a seemingly endless invasion of supernatural horrors. Specifically, it's akin to that breed of boots-on-the-ground tower defence/action-RPG crossover, as seen in the likes of Orcs Must Die and Sanctum, but with a survivalist bent. Sang-Froid might have had a bit of a rummage around in tower defence's wardrobe, but it comes out of it wearing an outfit so different that you mightn't ever guess its origins. It's both fascinating and infuriating: here's why. Artifice Studio's newly-released Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves is, for lack of a better term, an action-strategy-roleplaying game about trying to defend a small community in the 19th century Canadian wilderness from invading wolf-creatures.

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