delightful earthbound-like with combat that's also mario&luigi mashed up with warioware microgames, and way more pokemon references than you'd even guess

the combat balance is... completely wacky to be honest, the offensive skills seem just completely worse than hitting Fight every turn and racking up combo bonus damage.

the story and writing are fun, but not much more than that. i wish it went a bit more deeper on character development and depth especially in regards to their relationships to you/the protag.

still makes for a great time though! full of secrets too if you're into that stuff. wanted a bit more out of it but still happy with what it was.

First I'm gonna say this, unlike a lot of early players for this game, I was not a backer or a religious follower. Some time ago I saw that a silly indie RPG in a modern setting with a unique concept for combat was being made and I wishlisted it. Outside of a few snippets, I didn't know much before playing it.

This game starts off really wacky and I love it. Its simply throwing joke after joke, minigame after minigame, and its all really fun while establishing the game's really silly and hyper sense of humor and wacky variety in gameplay. And I'll say it now, the humor is the highlight of the game for me. It consistently had me laughing at almost every cutscene that attempted funnies and a good chunk of NPC dialog got a solid nose exhale out of me. So in terms of being weird and goofy, the game gets an A+ for me.

Then it just, and I'll keep this vague for spoiler reasons, randomly pulls a... Very dark twist out of nowhere. It's completely jarring, and I don't think it was supposed to be a joke. For a minute it kind of plays up the guilt and scale of what happened. "Okay" I thought, "this isn't what I expected at all but, hey, I wasn't immediately into how dark Omori got, and that's one of my favorite games ever." The only problem is that Knuckle Sandwich doesn't really focus on that. Knuckle Sandwich doesn't really focus on... Anything, unfortunately. Right around here, completely contrasting that, you get a big exposition dump about some sci-fi fantastical nonsense on how the world works as we explore some weird glitch world. So already I'm a bit confused on what they want to explore, and then when you get out the game begins to set up a mysterious conspiracy sort of maybe loosely related to what was dumped on you probably, Bus Driver isn't entirely sure at least.

Like, okay? Is this a grim comedy with dark themes, a modern fantasy adventure, or a conspiracy mystery story? It feels like the game tries to do all three at once and can't really focus on any of them. Even outside of story content, the required overworld minigames pretty much vanish after you get party members and not too long after the burger joint the game is named after just goes into the background until near the ending. This game is so dissociated it feels entirely different at the beginning, middle, and ending. The dark stuff after the mystery properly begins outside of a couple vague references completely vanishes until and I'm not joking the last section of the last proper dungeon of the game. The weird fantastical stuff also vanishes for large chunks of the middle of the game as you're exploring more of Bright City, my man Bus Driver stops hooking you up with info outside of a few set points once you get far enough, and even then all he usually has to say is "Maybe the info is here? Idk."

The conspiracy angle I guess fits this game the best, but it just doesn't explore it well enough. You spend a huge chunk of the game chasing a rival party that ends up meaning very little in the grand scheme of things. And god the actual twist on what's really going on is so freaking silly and hardly set-up since the game spent so much time exploring other stuff. The main "foreshadowing" is a running gag where I can't even tell how it would work in-universe. This would be fine if the game was all silly and goofy, but no right after the villain does some disastrous crap that's so freaking jarring, and then the game just... Moves on! Like yeah sure nothing to explore there.

I just did not care for the endgame of Knuckle Sandwich at all. It pulls back in the other two concepts it was exploring in a haphazard way that just seems so confused. Elaborating on the dark stuff after hours of not acknowledging it, pushing the fantastical elements front and center to the point where after the final boss the game just delves into complete goofy nonsense that while pretty funny feels like it undermines the game, and again, has a really unsatisfying twist of a conclusion.

So yeah... I'm not very big on the story if that isn't clear enough. However, I don't really have only bad to say about "story" scenes surprisingly enough.

Once again the humor is excellent, whenever the game is doing dumb Mario & Luigi-type shenanigans, I was fully into it. The many scenarios that crowded the middle of the game were also pretty amusing or interesting. Yeah doing random crap around this cruise ship is pretty much filler, but it's fun, and that's what I was looking for. I liked some of the characters, too. None of them are explored all that much, but I was happy when Echo, Thea, Bus Driver, and especially Brightside were around. The overworld was nice too, NPCs are great, sometimes they feel like they have their own little punchlines and progression as they appear throughout the game. The dungeons were fun too, nothing crazy but I think they struck a good balance of puzzles versus combat. I didn't find much in the overworld to explore outside of those, but what I did find was neat. Got really into the arcade minigames especially.

But hey, the story isn't what got me interested in the game. It was the combat, and... Yeah, it's pretty good! WarioWare is a series that has a special place in my heart and the idea of combining it with a typical turn-based RPG sounds ridiculous yet sort of genius. Dodging enemy attacks never got old to me, I love how sometimes the minigames make sense for what the enemy is and sometimes it's just "Play golf and avoid hitting the cow." While most are pretty basic with ideas I've seen many times before, they were still fun with very few exceptions.

This is where I start nitpicking.

First off, attacking. There are three minigames for regular attacks, which are all fun, but the circle one is way too strong. It's just easier and has way more damage potential and often for me resulted in getting wins way earlier. There's also the minigames for special attacks which are fun but man you just don't get that many. Each character gets like two? I was getting really sick of using beat up on the protagonist, hell, he doesn't get many skills at all considering you have him the whole game. Equipping skills as items is an option but those are limited by your small, occasionally annoying inventory, and even smaller amount of equipment options.

Party member balance seems to be an issue in general. You don't get to choose your partner until the late game but I don't know why you would choose anyone aside from Thea, it took me a while to realize it but her flare up skill just freaking breaks her with how strong she can get on gop of her pretty easy skill attack minigames. Thankfully though I think the difficulty is handled well to (mostly) offset that and most other things in the game. You can customize minigame difficulty and how much damage you take in percentages of 10 perfectly to fit how hard you want the game to be, on top of other options like autoheal or disabling EXP all together. I thought a lot of this game was too easy but after customizing it it felt just right. Only thing that seems annoying with challenge runs using those are those undodgeable attacks that hit everyone, those just feel cheap. Only other complaint I think worth mentioning is that I think a lot of bosses go on just a tad bit too long, but don't let that distract from the fact that overall, I had fun battling in this game. It's fast-paced, fun, and always kept my attention with what they were going to throw at me next. I was never flat-out sick of battling, which even happens for combat systems I love, and I think this game's fast pace is to thank for that.

And this all makes me feel really conflicted. I was having a good time running through this game, laughing at all the ridiculous scenes, getting into fun battles with the goofiest systems, and absolutely digging the GBA-inspired aesthetic and music which is just overall really solid. However, now when I think about this game having beaten it, my thoughts are just soured by just how disappointed I was with the story and how unhappy I am with how it unraveled in the ending. I mean how much of this review was just me being confused on what it was even going for? I don't know, I feel like I'm being too harsh. This game clearly had a lot of heart put into it, but it almost feels as if the game was so excited to put out all of its ideas that it got kind of lost on the way of doing it. I guess it's decent overall? I do see a lot of potential here, and Andy Brophy seems like a lovable dude, so I'm definitely interested in seeing what he cooks up in the future.

Honestly a little bit of a letdown. The wait for this really got my hopes up, but I ended up just wanting it to be over way too early into the game.

It’s a really cool idea that, in hindsight, might have been a better fit for a smaller project, as the mini-games get extremely tedious by the end of the game. Luckily, this game isn’t a grind fest, so you can get away with avoiding a handful of fights.

This game clearly pulls a lot from Earthbound but fails to capture the positive weirdness of that game, instead going for something different that works in some areas, but doesn’t really do a lot in most. Also, it brings over my absolute least favourite thing from Earthbound, the inventory system. Why is everything in one menu with 8 slots? Once you get to Chapter 6, this is less of an issue, but for 50% of the game, you have max 16 inventory slots shared with key items and weapons. So so so stupid and does nothing to improve the experience.

Also, the story just isn't really that interesting. It does a lot at the start to make you think, "oh the story is just a background device to let weird shit happen, don't worry too much", but then the latter half of this game is purely story-based. It feels more like a slap in the face than an earned progression into something more serious.

But yeah, I wish this game was better, but it isn't bad! Just think there are better, more fun RPGs out there, and the main gimmick only distracts from that for so long. I might be being a little harsh here, but playing Sea of Stars so recently, which was such a crowning achievement, made this feel more like a wet fart than a long-awaited payoff.

god i feel like i had so many things i wanted to say about this game but now that i'm actually writing this review i'm left kinda speechless lol

visually, the game is phenomenal. it has all of these mediums it uses throughout and they all look awesome. i especially love the little animation the cursor does when a minigame starts and ends.

speaking of the minigames, they were pretty fun! except the bullet hell ones but i'm also just bad at dodging lol. they weren't too difficult to complete, but even if they were, the dev put in little settings you can adjust if the gameplay is too hard.

the story was...alright? i mean it wasn't especially moving to me, and the epilogue was a lil weird. it did have some moments that got a reaction out of me though so it's pretty good.

all in all it was fun to notice the little easter eggs and inspiration from other video games, and i'd totally love to see a dev commentary or something along the lines of that!

"My body is a temple... And you just stepped in with your shoes on."

been waiting a while for this one, and it came out really good! but it's a little underbaked in some areas. if you're anything like me the gameplay mechanics probably caught your eye (superstar saga turn-based combat with warioware minigames and rhythm heaven elements), and it feels pretty dang good to play overall, but the balancing is inconsistent and honestly kind of frustrating at times. for example, there are 3 different types of minigames that play for your regular attack at random, two of them are a bpm based minigame where you have to tap in time with a prompt and it gets faster as you keep going, and the third where a cursor slides past a damage meter, like a lot of other turn-based games. this third attack seems to do the most damage, however, like i said the minigame you get is random. on top of this, the protagonist can be weaaaak in a lot of fights and his skills aren't usually worth using either due to damage outputs which means you'll have to rely on your party member to do all the heavy hitting, which is probably a big factor of why this game has such a steep difficulty curve in later chapters, especially if you don't feel like killing every enemy you encounter (though you can reduce different difficulty aspects in the settings, which is a nice feature)

overall knuckle sandwich is a peculiar experience that reminded me why i love this medium of game development so much. its not a perfect game by any means but it has a nice visual style, a lot of laugh out loud moments and a great soundtrack to boot that make it memorable. so yeaaa i reccomend it if you're into rpgs or quirky indies #swag...

I'm really happy to say that knuckle sandwich was not a casualty of its decade long development cycle. The amount of time spent on this game shows in the density of novelty, one-off mechanics, visual gags and high effort set pieces, especially in the combat encounters, comparable to that of deltarune chapter 2, a game made by a man with infinite money.

Those combat encounters are, in many ways, the highlight of the entire experience. Between the unique mini games given to almost every enemy and definitely every boss, the psychedelic procedural backgrounds that accommodate them, and the regular breaks from format to make a single joke, knuckle sandwich is a breezy experience that rarely overstays its welcome even if you feel as conflicted about other parts of it as I do (more later). I did find the game's maths to be confusing and kind of unpolished, with numerous skills shockingly under tuned, others over tuned, and a really inconsistent approach two enemies health and defence stats that make it very difficult to tell if you're actually doing decent damage for any particular encounter.

I'd like to give particular praise to the game's OST, created by a bunch of independent artists who aren't necessarily in games, and God does it show! Swagger and personality oozes out of every track and manages to make even some of the least interesting locations shine through sound. Special props to the standard battle tracks "Handsome Humans" and "Fearsome Freaks" as well as "Nothing Sweeter" and "Brightfang Lash".

In broad spoiler free terms, the story and writing writ large is the biggest letdown of the game. Knuckle sandwich has whimsy, much like many indie RPGs of its lineage, but it doesn't have much in the way of emotion. Your party characters barely allow you to endear yourself to them by letting you know basically anything about them (the most i ever got was one character being a former athlete who struggles with chronic health issues, said once in optional dialogue). All characters in general could serve to be A bit more intense and punchy than they are? For the simpler archetypes to land. The strong thematic basis of "being a young person working sucks" doesn't last, and with the story being almost entirely driven by a very simple plot, knuckle sandwich is left feeling like it's about nothing but very, VERY gentle satire for most of its runtime. That's about all I can say without delving into plot details.

Ultimately, knuckle sandwich is a very light and breezy time, at a crisp 10-15 hours, full of novelty and virtuosic presentation, but struggles to be a story worth the grandiosity of the JRPG format. In other words, it's a really good Mario and Luigi game.

Really loved this title! It has a very solid identity and the reveals in the plot are quite fun. At a first look, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that this is another "depression earthbound-like" game, but that's not quite right. The gameplay is an extremely fun combo of traditional RPG elements and MANY WarioWare-like mini games. I'll leave more detailed thoughts below:

Combat in this game is genuinely so smart. The game cleverly rewards players for interacting with its mini-games by offering big amounts of damage from perfecting them - especially enemy attacks. This means you are always on the offensive in combat, making battles very exciting for those that may not be "into" the turn based format. I love that statuses are also new and exciting in this game. Long gone are the days of turn based poison damage, here statuses effect you're ability to interact with the mini-games, which effects your damage. However if you are a skilled player, you will be able to overcome these hurdles - I really like this, the game is always finding ways of rewarding the player for playing it well.

The art style is very charming - I've genuinely not seen a game that looks quite like it. It's not afraid to throw little doodles in your face for a laugh and the switch from 2D sprites to 3D models in cutscenes is really interesting! It artistically separates the areas of interest very very well. A lot of the animations are also interesting in this game? They are strangely fluid in a way that scratches my brain lmao. The 2D sprites have non-tile based animation in battle, giving them a particularly lively look. (i really love how the applebat moves for instance)

The music knocks it out of the park, I really love all the tracks of the game and I'll be adding quite a few to my playlist soon : ]

I really only have a few criticisms - I think in the first 3-4 hours of the game there are quite a lot of cutscenes. I think it could do well to cut down on a few or allow the player to explore a little earlier. I also wish the girl characters in this game were allowed to be sillier - none of them really reach the silliness in design or personality of B-side, Dolus, Mr. Apricot, etc.

Otherwise, I really adored this game - I could definitely find myself coming back to it to replay one of these days. I really don't see where the lower scores are coming from - but one word of warning, please make sure to pick up the game again once you beat it!

I Kickstarted this game like 6 years ago or something, as a guy I was in the military with did some of the soundtrack (gyms, obviously not his real name). So I've known about this project for like 10 years, and was the wait worth it? Honestly, yeah. I was very happy with the final product. I can imagine it being the next undertail with how charming and unique the gameplay is. I actually looked forward to battling new enemies to see how the combat might change, and what abilities I might encounter. I wish I had changed my name in the credits from, but oh well. It's long enough to pick out when it happens.

Knuckle Sandwich is visually and aesthetically astounding RPG with a pretty wild idea of combat mechanics. I would say it's like what if you had Mario & Luigi mechanics of dodging attacks along with Warioware microgames to counterattack enemies and deal the best damage all in an RPG. You can clearly tell that the developer put so much inspiration from the medium and tries so much to deliver on a fulfilling combat system, story, characters, and word. Despite this, I kinda didn't connect with the game. Like I clearly see 'The Vision' and love put into this short RPG but I wasn't as wowed by the story or characters in the game; I can certainly say though it gets crazy and some to most will see the charm in it with its weirdness. While the game didn't click with me and didn't pull me in with some personal feelings and flaws such as the limited inventory, I DO respect this game and hope for its success as it did take a long time to make this. It's a pretty good title I will say and, if you want to play it, I recommend trying out the demo first to see if the gameplay and/or story really connects with you so you can buy it.

Was waiting for this game for ages and I was pretty excited based on the demo and music. I want to like it a lot, but unfortunately it just didn't hit the expectations I had for it. I would still say it's exactly what I expected it to be, but the execution of everything but its presentation just feels off. It's very obvious what the game is taking inspiration from but the way it emulates them just isn't on the same level.

I'm no expert on storytelling but the game puts so much emphasis on being weird at the start that I feel like it skips over some steps in character and world building. As a result, some later parts of the game fell flat for me. There are opportunities to explore the map beyond the story bits, but I had zero drive to do so.

The combat is fun but I fear some of the fights go on for a bit too long. A lot of the special skills felt only marginally better than just doing the normal attack mini-games. Stat changes didn't feel impactful at all and offensive consumables never felt useful. Normal attacks get one of three seemingly random forms, but the circle one always felt like the weakest for the most effort.

The inventory is limited in this game which is BY FAR the worst part. Maybe the intent is for me to be using consumables more regularly, but it never felt necessary so my limited slots we're full 90% of the time. You get enough items that I kept finding myself having to decide which one I'm going to throw out. There are times where you find an item and you don't even know what it does, but you have to decide if you want to toss something for it or not. Even worse, sometimes you have to drop an item to pick up a necessary key item. There is an item storage system, but they're too few and far between even after a patch meant to fix it.

Didn't dislike the game, but I wish it resonated with me a bit more. As a full work of art it's really amazing, but the game itself is just okay. Music is really incredible though, and that'll stick with me.

Knuckle Sandwich is REALLY close to being an absolutely perfectly uneven game. If it pulled one or two fewer punches near the end I'd totally forgive it for how much the plot meanders from one rushed plot thread to another rushed plot thread, hell I'd even see the game's sometimes clumsy sometimes downright abrasive design as a plus not a minus. It's like, already in the range of simulating the confusing absurd agency-killing sometimes brutal mundanities of service industry life, if it could just take that laaaast stretch over the whole thing would fit like a glove and I'd call it a miracle game whose disparate pieces somehow manage to line up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Christ, it's not like the game doesn't deserve it, every bit of it is brimming with this loving attention to detail, all these new and fun and lively bits that just keep winning you back in every time the game feels like it's daring you to lose interest in it outright. I want for nothing else than for Knuckle Sandwich to be the kinda sleeper hit that filters everyone but the Realest Kinosseurs of true Ludonarrative Mastery.

... but the future refused to change.

I played the demo when it first released (who knows how long ago that was, the date I set is just a guess)
but yeah, if this ever gets completed, it’s definitely gonna be one of my favorite games
a cross between Earthbound and WarioWare? thats like my two favorite things boi!

he said itll be done in 2023 fingers crossed!
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