mook 最近的評論

this game makes me hyperventilate man

is very nice

this is my pseoduregalia

i dont like roguelikes and i hardly ever play card games and this managed to win me over with the classic daniel mullins rabbithole/frog-fractions-like flavor. this game is so peak

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! let's make one thing absolutely clear, this game changed me. this is one of my alltime favorites now. ok

this a good one this ones a keeper super charming style and great puzzles

peak puzzle gaming

tf2

horror comedy multiplayer jamboree

Alright, so here's the deal.
I've beaten the game and I'm left with a really strange feeling. What I played isn't at all what I expected or even wanted. After following this game for about 7 years, part of me hates that dissonance, and another part of me wants to celebrate it as some kind of victory for artistic expression.
This review is marked Negative, but I still believe the game is worth playing. Read further, it's complicated. lol

Visually and musically, this game is an absolute triumph. I have no notes there. It's absolute eye and ear candy all the way through.
For a while, the story didn't hook me at all. It completely drops the intrigue set up by the opening in favor of an entirely unrelated plot. For a while, I found myself resenting this direction, but towards the end (and I mean the VERY end) this new direction started to actually interest me. Even so, its so just bizarre that the game's namesake has little to do with the story it ends up telling. Sorta gives off the vibe that some major story restructuring happened after the game was successfully crowdfunded.

And the gameplay. Oh my, the gameplay.
The bare fundamentals of combat are great, another thing I have no notes on. The minigames are super fun. Combat can occasionally overstay its welcome, and when that happens, the game drags A LOT. But man, there are some bigger issues in other places.
Inventory management is the big thing you're gonna hear a lot of people complaining about. Each party member only has 8 item slots, and these slots get taken up by equipped and key items. This is an archaic system that deserved to be left in the 90s.
The game's level design is also just bad. In the bigger areas, I would be wandering around aimlessly for just slightly too long. And don't even get me started on the game's "puzzles" (trial-and-error guesswork implemented ONLY to bloat playtime).
Clearly the time spent on playtesting was only used for finding bugs, not refining the player experience.

By the end though, I was left with this really weird feeling. There was a lot of the game I hated, but I couldn't be mad at it. It's in this limbo state between incredible artistic expression and meaningless schlop.
No one will truly understand what I mean by this, but that's okay: I can draw a lot of parallels between this and YIIK.
Development went on for so long that the tastes of the developer seem to have changed. The core vision seems to have morphed throughout development, resulting in a confused final product. It's just so fascinating to think about.
I say "seem to have" because there's no way of knowing for certain. The creative process is complicated. Maybe this was all the plan from the very beginning, and we were none the wiser? I don't know.

There are secrets in this game I haven't seen yet, and I don't think I can give a fully informed opinion without first seeing it all. So, take my words for what they're worth. I've just beaten the game.

If there's anything you get out of reading this, let it be this (TL;DR): Knuckle Sandwich is worth playing.
I signed up for "Andrew Brophy's macabre cannibalism RPG" but I got "Andy Brophy's WarioWare goblin RPG"
I want people to see what I see here. Dive into the mind of Andy Brophy and pick away at the layers, try to see what happened here. It's all just really fascinating.

I was missing from the Kickstarter Backer credits, but that's since been fixed.

I updated my review after beating the game. The original review is under the line
_____________
leaving an early positive review for the algorithm boost cuz it's deserved
the visuals+music+combat absolutely live up to the hype
the story is mostly boring so far (8.8 hours in, halfway through chapter 5)
inventory management is a total pain in the ass (only 8 inventory slots per character. equipped items + key items take up those slots. party members take items with them when they leave the party (there's an option to "swap" inventories when they leave ??? what does this mean??))
there are questionable level design decisions including really brutal enemy placements
so its honestly a great game with a lot of great moments, but the negative bits just bring the overall package down a lot.
right now i'd put it at like a 6.5/10. this may raise if the story manages to wow me or if it pulls something insane that ties it all together