Strictly speaking, it doesn’t matter whether you know how to play chess or not, because there’s a short tutorial that teaches you the basics of the game. Yet, much as is the case with Balatro and poker, if you understand the game that underpins Passant, you’re going to start having fun with it quite a bit sooner.
What is Passant?
En passant is actually a special and little used rule in chess that deals with a specific taking move between pawns (or prawns as I used to call them when I was young). As well as having its roots in the history of the game, Passant is also a roguelike-infused puzzler that takes the best elements of chess and remixes them into a new deckbuilder-inspired format.
Given the strength of the theme, if you know how to play chess, you’ll be up and running in no time. Due to some erratic clicking on my part, I actually experienced a little UI bugginess when trying to navigate the tutorial, and so I restarted the game and skipped the tutorial entirely. My pre-existing knowledge of chess, and countless hours spent in games like Balatro, meant that I was able to work out what was going on in no time at all.
Chess is a complicated game, and I suspect that total beginners will experience a much steeper difficulty curve than I did. At least the game is quite easy to parse from a tactical perspective, and developer Marc Makes Games has done a sterling job of showing you how your immediate actions will play out as you hover over the different pieces on the board.
Taking backsies
Even if you can see where your pieces can move, and also look at info columns down the side of the screen with additional relevant details about your tactical options, if you’re anything like me, you’ll still balls up all the time. For those situations, there is a blessed undo button. You’ve got up to three chances to take back a stupid move, and believe me, you’re going to need them.
I have my own impulsivity issues, especially during complex scenarios where it can feel like there are too many decisions to work through, and that means mistakes are going to be made. As is always the case when playing against someone proficient at chess, making a rushed move is nearly always rewarded with the loss of a piece, and so having a lever to pull that fixes those obvious errors is super helpful.
Things get significantly more complex when other factors come into play that are nothing to do with traditional chess. Whether you’re adding new pieces to your collection via the shop, changing their arrangement before each round, or even modifying them via coins, there are loads of ways to make huge changes that still sit broadly within the logic of traditional chess.
When chess goes rogue
Not only can you do a bunch of boring “standard” moves, you can also give your pieces special abilities, such as reviving them when fallen, or upgrades based on what piece they take. As well as upgradable pawns, you can also unlock entirely new variants, themed around original chess pieces, now with enhanced movesets. Similarly, you’ll encounter bosses every third round, and these also offer additional chess-like challenges, such as having two kings at once.
It doesn’t take long before you’re upgrading your chess pieces, moving their starting positions, and buying tokens and coins that do fun things in certain situations. As you enhance your set and unlock new tactical options, your opponents also become more powerful. As in traditional chess, you’re trying to get the opposing king into check mate, but it’s often much easier to wipe out all of their pieces instead, as that’s also an instant win.
There are moments that might frustrate and sometimes the pace of a round can drop off the edge of a cliff, but I can’t see there being too many stalemates given the broad range of potential variables at play here. The most undercooked part of the game in my view was a couple of poorly designed pieces that were either a blend of black and white, or too close to their original designs to easily tell apart.
There is still much for me to discover, and I’ve not even touched the challenge modes or fiddled with the difficulty settings (I’m no grand master). I look forward to returning to this one because Passant is very much my cup of tea, given my love of roguelikes and turn-based games, and also my lifelong interest in chess after growing up playing with my friends and family. If you’ve got an origin story like mine, you’ll probably enjoy it similarly. On the other hand, if you’ve never played chess before, I reckon you’ll have a good time too, but good luck getting your head around all those rules.
Passant is out now on PC (Win) and I played via access kindly provided by the game’s developer!
