Johan builds its movelist out of the margins of a medieval manuscript

You play a rabbit. Not a person with a rabbit head — a rabbit, drawn straight out of a medieval manuscript and sent after the armies of knights ravaging the land it came from. Johan is quick, nimble and lethal with a sword, and every enemy he meets is bigger than he is. The core exchange is a parry: time the block to the incoming swing, lower the enemy’s posture with each one you catch, and when the posture breaks, step inside and trigger a finisher.

Posture-first combat is not new. What is unusual is where the rest of the movelist comes from. Scattered around the world are pages of an illuminated manuscript, and each page you find is a creature you can summon into a fight — the odd grotesques of medieval folklore, each with its own abilities and its own advantage against a particular kind of foe. The collectible is not a stat bump on a menu. It is a new participant in the fight, and the developer frames finding them as an invitation to experiment mid-combat rather than to settle into a build and stop thinking.

The third verb is traversal, and it is also rabbit-shaped. Innate agility gets you across the world quickly, and a viney grappling hook gets you up onto the parts of it that were never meant to be reachable. That is the exploration layer with a job: the pages are out there in the hidden places, and moving like a rabbit is how you go and collect them.

The art direction is carrying mechanical weight too. A world painted in flat gold-leaf manuscript style sets expectations about what is allowed to walk into a fight. A snail the size of a warhorse is not a gag in that register — it is period-accurate, and it means the bestiary can stay strange without ever needing to explain itself.

What Makes a Good Combat System? argues that strong combat runs on choices: where to stand, who to hit first, which move fits the moment, when to commit, and how you answer the attack coming back at you. A pure parry-and-posture duel concentrates almost everything into that last question. Johan’s bet is that the summons hand the other questions back. If a called creature genuinely changes who you should be hitting first and where you need to be standing while it happens, the fight has more than one axis. If the summons are just damage in a costume, the game is a very beautiful single-answer duel.

How Games Do Health makes the case that a health system is a design tool rather than a failure meter — the way a game takes damage away and gives it back is what decides whether players retreat, explore, or charge in. Posture is that same lever, pointed at the enemy instead of at you. A bar that only falls while you stand inside an attack, and recovers the moment you back off, is an instruction. It is the reason a rabbit is willing to hold his ground in front of a knight twice his height rather than play the whole game at the end of a rolling dodge.

How To Combine Video Game Genres is the essay to hold this one to. Its argument is that a mash-up works when each genre has a real job and all of them point at the same focus. Johan is three things at once: a duelling game, a collection game and a movement game. The joins are where it gets won or lost. The grappling hook has to lead somewhere that holds a page, the pages have to meaningfully change how a fight goes, and the fights have to leave you wanting the next page. Let any one of those links go slack and the other two turn into filler around a combat system that was doing fine on its own.

Johan is by Vercors Studio, self-published, filed under Action, Adventure and Indie. It is coming to Windows, and the release date is genuinely unannounced — the store page says to be announced and nothing more. Single-player, full controller support, and the page recommends a gamepad, which in a game built on parry timing reads more like a hardware spec than a preference.

The premise is aimed better than most. Medieval marginalia is already full of armed rabbits turning on knights — a real running joke among the scribes who drew them — so building a revenge story on that image means the tone, the bestiary and the difficulty all descend from one source instead of being three unrelated decisions that have to be reconciled later. The summons are the clearest example: pulling creatures off manuscript pages is both the fiction and the progression system, and neither had to be bent to fit the other.

If the appeal here is being the small animal in a genre designed around armoured heroes, Stray Dog is the other one on this list — a soulslike that makes you a nameless hound and then refuses to let you graduate into a somebody. Both games take the scale mismatch as the point rather than as a handicap to be grown out of, and in both cases it changes what a boss fight actually is.