Although its character has become the mascot of Data East, Karnov is a mostly forgotten title, for understandable reasons. The game was published for arcade, before receiving an NES port, that made some decisions to lower the difficulty of the title. Nevertheless, some more structural problems remained and made the gameplay experience very poor.
The player takes the role of Karnov, whose objective is different from the arcade version; instead of searching for treasure, the protagonist is sent on a quest against evil by God. This black and white approach could be explained by Nintendo's influence, as their titles are still very binary and traditional in their representation of moral conflicts. In any case, Karnov travels through nine stages to defeat a series of monsters, recalling the progression of Castlevania (1986). Unlike the latter, Karnov suffers from an excessively rigid and unnatural design. The lack of variation in the jumps and the strange hitbox - it isn't positioned on the character's sprite, but in front of him - are particularly frustrating, especially as the enemy projectiles are rather fast and hard to see. In the same frustrating fashion, while Karnov can direct the direction of his fall after a jump, he cannot if he drops from a platform. The item system is particularly bad, with players having to cycle through options with the left and right buttons on the D-Pad: it can result in a death, if enemy projectiles are flying around. Worse still, some items can only be used in very specific situations that the game chooses, making progression inelegant.
The game design tries to be non-linear with several possible pathways, but these are of no real interest - since they only yield resources that are never really useful -, all the more so as the game atmosphere does not save it. Karnov is the bastard child of cultural influences inherited from Tengrism and Ancient Greece (temples with caryatids), lacking any real consistency. The game is constantly bathed in sepia colours, a common cliché associated with Central Asia, and not very pleasant to the eye. At the very most, the American port is less punishing than the Famicom version, with its unlimited continues. Nevertheless, Karnov remains a tasteless title, whose execrable playability leaves no memory.
The player takes the role of Karnov, whose objective is different from the arcade version; instead of searching for treasure, the protagonist is sent on a quest against evil by God. This black and white approach could be explained by Nintendo's influence, as their titles are still very binary and traditional in their representation of moral conflicts. In any case, Karnov travels through nine stages to defeat a series of monsters, recalling the progression of Castlevania (1986). Unlike the latter, Karnov suffers from an excessively rigid and unnatural design. The lack of variation in the jumps and the strange hitbox - it isn't positioned on the character's sprite, but in front of him - are particularly frustrating, especially as the enemy projectiles are rather fast and hard to see. In the same frustrating fashion, while Karnov can direct the direction of his fall after a jump, he cannot if he drops from a platform. The item system is particularly bad, with players having to cycle through options with the left and right buttons on the D-Pad: it can result in a death, if enemy projectiles are flying around. Worse still, some items can only be used in very specific situations that the game chooses, making progression inelegant.
The game design tries to be non-linear with several possible pathways, but these are of no real interest - since they only yield resources that are never really useful -, all the more so as the game atmosphere does not save it. Karnov is the bastard child of cultural influences inherited from Tengrism and Ancient Greece (temples with caryatids), lacking any real consistency. The game is constantly bathed in sepia colours, a common cliché associated with Central Asia, and not very pleasant to the eye. At the very most, the American port is less punishing than the Famicom version, with its unlimited continues. Nevertheless, Karnov remains a tasteless title, whose execrable playability leaves no memory.