this is the most difficult negative review i've given.

it's so hard to say that i think this game is kind of mediocre, because so, so, SO much of it is worth your time that i think its worth people looking at regardless of quality.

i'll try to be clinical about this one, but first ill address the issue i have with the game that is sort of the root of many disappointments i have with the game: the hook.

it's not fair. i know it's not fair to judge a game for what it isn't rather than what it is. i know i wanted the game to be about you killing people and serving them as hamburgers because that's what the end of the demo implied. i know i wanted to see a story that was ABOUT keeping these horrible things from your three co-workers and the guilt that tore you up inside over it. the warioware sensibilities themselves would be almost a cruel mockery of what you did. the world stays twee and quirky despite the horrible thing you did.

but it wasn't about that. frankly, i don't think it was about anything.

right, clinical.

This game is exceptional in quite a few areas, and nearly all of them involve the game's audiovisual presentation.

The soundtrack, done by Andy himself along with nelward, the Gyms, Joe Aquiare, Barchboi and lizzy are all fantastic. Despite the wide range of composers, none of them ever felt out of place in any given situation. They all fit the surreal and absurd world of Knuckle Sandwich like a glove.

The visual style, the graphics, everything is presented with such candy-coated sweetness that even remembering some of the game's more questionable sections, I also remember how visually captivating the game's battle UI is, or the silly clay animations whenever you find a goblin, or even just the random, rainbow colored NPCs that speak gibberish to you. So much of this game is so, so wonderful to experience in the moment.

The game's combat centers around microgames, timed attacks, and timed dodges. I think the game succeeds at approximately 85-90% of the microgames, while the attack and dodge system never felt wrong to me. The game continually spices up the basic attack command through three different variants, all of which felt very satisfying to pull off (I got a x28 combo with the circle attack. Thank you, Hatsune Miku, for training me). The timed dodges, too, never felt non-intuitive. The moment I figured out an enemy's tell, I could always dodge their basic attacks.

ah

i really don't want to keep going

i really wish i could just stop and leave it there

it'd be so easy

but

There are two pillars of problems with Knuckle Sandwich as a game. That being its game design and its story.

Knuckle Sandwich's game design issues are cumulative in nature. A lot of small issues coagulating into major problems that make the gamefeel incredibly unusual. I'll list them here:

- Stat values feel almost entirely meaningless with the exception of your speed. This is the root of many of the game's issues regarding gamefeel.
- Buffing and debuffing skills, for the very few that exist, barely make any impact as a result.
- There is no skill that allows you to lower an enemy's Defense. This is a problem because of a point I will address later.
- There is no consistent curve of enemy Defense values, which means your attacks will rapidly oscillate between doing 20 damage to one enemy and then doing 1 damage to the next.
- There are never any shops when you actually need shops. I accumulated vast amounts of Fortune Rocks and rarely ever used them.
- The inventory system is genuinely abysmal. Each party member is given eight slots. The items that take up space include consumables, equipment, and key items.
- Armor and Weapons rarely make a significant difference in combat.
- Boss fights are more or less scripted encounters where the boss exhausts all of their dialogue and either reduces their Defense value drastically, or they remove the RPG elements entirely and just have the fight be a completely different game.
- Even in boss fights without these scripted elements, they are oftentimes meat sponges that will take upwards to fifteen turns to beat. This, to me, is unacceptable.
- The damage dealt by your special moves is oftentimes worse than your standard attack. Even if you perfect the microgame, you can easily outdo the damage without the EP cost by doing your timed attack.
- The defend action only recovers a single point of EP. This is completely worthless and only serves to waste an action.
- The only healing skill in the game heals 11 HP. This is almost completely worthless.
- Once you acquire all three party members, you cannot swap them out in combat if your party member has fallen. This, to me, defeats the point of that system.
- I only got one skill that afflicts a status effect. It never afflicted it once.
- Status effects feel meaningless when applied to enemies.

All of these issues are either the root of an issue or are the resulting issue. Even the novelty of new microgames with every fight wears thin when every fight feels at least two turns too long and there are so few skills I can use to meaningfully accelerate the rate of combat. It's hard to prepare for any given fight because there's so few equipment, and what equipment does exist barely makes a difference. I don't even want to use skills because the damage they do barely means anything, and there's a decent chance that doing high damage barely even matters in a boss fight anyways.

Perhaps it is a commentary on my lack of agency in the story. Let's talk about what the story actually is.

The game's hook, as I mentioned before, is perfect. After arriving in Bright City and going on a gameshow in an attempt to find a job, you are completely unqualified for anything and are forced to go elsewhere. You end up going to Gorilla Burger, a terrible fast food joint. At the end of the night, you're attacked by a knife-wielding gangster while taking out the trash, and you end up killing him. After the game's surrealism, this was a lurch. Even more of a lurch is when your boss witnesses a murder, and decides the best course of action is to cook him. It ends with him patenting this horrific act of cannibalism as the world's first...

Knuckle Sandwich.

It's flawless. It's immaculate. It doesn't come up again until the last hour of the game.

The actual story is that Bright City is in danger due to some sort of Anomaly. It's causing the world to go out of whack, and you need to figure out who's causing it. The problem is that a lot of people think that you're the Anomaly, and are trying to get rid of you as a result. There's also a group called the Brightfangs who have their own agenda. It's fairly self-evident early on that they are extremists working towards an ultimately positive end, and the people you and your co-workers ostensibly trust are actually not very trustworthy.

Oh, right. You deliver some food to a stupid billionaire named Mr. Apricot. He's useless, but you assume he's just some guy. There's also someone named Xander. He's a justice cop. He dies and was a stooge of the real villain, the gameshow host. He's the twist villain who is pulling the strings. Except it's actually his assistant, Prima. She's the real twist villain.

Throughout being pulled and crammed through all of these situations, there's barely a sense of friendship forming between you and your party members. This isn't an RPG where you get a character sidequest with your three co-workers that gives you some insight into them. They just exist alongside you. When the game killed them after revealing the second twist villain, I didn't feel much of anything. It was surprising, I suppose, but I knew they wouldn't commit to it. They didn't.

(Edit: There are apparently secret scenes that you get through means that are not intuitive to me and involve friendship variables. I saw the scene with Echo on YouTube. It was cute. It probably would've helped me feel a bit more for the characters. I wish they weren't so obscured.)

The point I'm getting at here is that none of this means anything. Nothing is ever developed to a satisfying conclusion. The final conclusion to the game is going back in time before the game began in order to rectify you killing the guy at the beginning and killing the Anomaly, the Tiny Baby, before it can do anything (also, the boss at Gorilla Burger had an arrangement with the gangster to kill employees and turn them into food beforehand. So it's not like the "world's first knuckle sandwich" was actually the world's first. He's been doing this the whole time to feed those rainbow colored NPCs. They're mutants, by the way. That was an okay twist that didn't amount to much).

Busdriver (the guy who occasionally pops in and goes "wow that's crazy anyways im working on goblins right now and spirit cells) helps you out at the very end and apologizes to you for ruining your life and dragging you through all of this. You're finally given the choice to either forgive him or not to forgive him, and then you can choose whether to stay in Bright City or work as his partner.

None of this means anything.

Your lack of agency in the plot is felt throughout the game in ways I would consider unintentional, and it is never directly addressed until the last minute of the game. I desperately wanted a moment where the protagonist acknowledged the ridiculousness of the plot and being shunted from place to place without any rhyme or reason. Even a brief moment of rebellion would've made it clear what a nightmare the experience was and would've given it more weight. The protagonist never did.

If the game was about overconsumption and capitalism, it failed at that, too. There was a brief flicker of hope when Prima, the second twist villain, casually asked for backup after the Anomaly escapes, and your party member asks "who's responsible for this," which she's been trying to figure out the entire game. Prima, at first, addresses the fact that there is no "one person" responsible for this. You think for a moment that she's pointing out that there is no "final boss of capitalism." It's a system. That might've saved it for me. But no. Prima is responsible for this. It's just her. She's the CEO of Capitalism, actually.

I'm still thinking about the hook.

Maybe it's actually fair to criticize the game for that hook. It had gold on a platter, showed it to me, then tossed it out in favor of semi-coherent surreal shenanigans. It's less of a "criticizing the game for what it isn't." That's more akin to watching a horror film and complaining it isn't funny enough. The film is about horror. Unless it makes itself known as a horror comedy, you can't really get mad that it isn't funny.

But attempting to be funny and failing in a horror movie would be perfectly reasonable grounds for criticizing it for that, in the same way introducing horror into a comedic game can be done poorly. If the horror is barely developed, either failing to be integrated into the game's comedy or failing to transform into its own, terrifying monster, then it fails.

You shouldn't have introduced it to begin with.

well

im gonna lie down. this was miserable. it's hard to convey how sullen this whole experience has made me.

sorry, andrew brophy

maybe next time

-me perusing through my steam library of 400+ games and stumbling across crypt of the necrodancer-

"oh hey! i remember this game. i played it like, way back in 2016 and i just kinda stopped. i wonder why i bounced off of it?"

-10 hours later-

"oh. that's why."

i'll admit that i didn't get very far on my earliest runs of the game. i'm not the best at video games now and that fact was doubly true back when i first played crypt of the necrodancer. its the sort of game that is simultaneously very easy to pick up and very easy to put down.

i'll get the parts i do like out of the way. it's got a great soundtrack, of course, and a number of the characters are actually quite fun to play. the zones get kinda samey but enemy behavior is varied enough that it never gets too repetitive

at least if you're doing well.

part of why i bounced off this game twice before actually completing the game was because losing in this game is miserable. you don't have to start all over from zone 1 (by default, anyways) but the experience of losing repeatedly means hearing the same songs with the same repetitive motions with the same enemies that just keep killing you because you keep putting yourself in bad positions.

it gets dull. really, really dull.

it's not just a "im bad at the game" thing. other rogue-likes with semi-complex gameplay loops like this one don't tend to make me feel bored in the same way, and i think it has to do with the core concept.

see, crypt of the necrodancer is a "rhythm game/dungeon crawler." all of your actions, which would normally be the dungeon crawling, are forced to follow the song's bpm. it's a novel concept, and one that got me interested in the game to begin with.

the thing is, i feel like the game designers spent a lot more time designing the "dungeon crawler" part than the "rhythm game" part. most of the difficulty emerges as a result of an enemy's specific design as opposed to how hard it is to hit notes. for most characters, you don't even need to hit all the notes unless you want to keep your money multiplier.

there are a couple instances where the rhythm element is focused on. that being bolt/coda, king conga, and the tempo up/down buttons, but all of these examples are sparse.

tempo up/down is basically just forcing you to either move faster or slower, either giving you less time to react or more time to react.

king conga is the only song in the game where the beats are not perfectly and evenly spaced out. i really, really wish more songs utilized something like this

bolt/coda is basically a living hyper tempo up button. you hit twice as many beats as normal. all this serves to do is to remove the strategic element of the game and forces you to act on impulse unless you're a top tier player of the game. i don't think most people are, frankly.

that's mostly it. most songs in the game have their notes be perfectly and evenly spaced out from one another. most runs are just mindlessly tap, tap, tapping to the rhythm. the only variation is in the songs themselves.

frankly, i think this is a wasted opportunity. give the actual rhythm part some significance! having more songs playing in different time signatures would go a long way to making the gameplay feel less monotonous. have it be so that maintaining your rhythm rewards you with more damage rather than just a coin multiplier.

but this is mostly why the game would be a soft 3/5 stars as opposed to a more solid 4. because the game, as is, is mostly solid. so why am i rating this 2 stars?

Enter: Aria

i cannot fathom Aria. in what world do you design a roguelike's story mode and have Aria be a required character to beat the main story? Imagine playing The Binding of Isaac and in order to see all of the main story content you have to play as Isaac, then Judas, then THE LOST and you can't finish the story unless you beat the game with all three characters. it's not impossible but why the hell would you gatekeep the last third of the story behind one of the hardest characters in the game?

i grit my teeth playing as Aria. it was baffling to me already but i powered through it and assumed it'd get easier as it went along. it did, to an extent. going from Zone 4 to Zone 1 meant that the difficulty waned a bit over time.

unfortunately, there was little I could do to prepare for the fight with the Golden Lute.

genuinely one of the worst final bosses i've ever had the displeasure of facing. Cadence and Melody had fights against the Necrodancer himself. while not ridiculously easy, it was the sort of difficulty i could practice my way out of.

The Golden Lute is not so simple. I practiced that fight over a hundred times and could only win a quarter of them, even when I knew what I was supposed to do. let's just ignore the fact that the best way to fight the Golden Lute is by playing the fight in the most boring way possible. y'know, once again having to do the monotonous "tap, tap, tapping" against a bounce pad so the boss happens to land next to me because Aria dies if you miss a note and thus normally you have to constantly move.

again, let's ignore that.

the boss's erratic movement patterns, the fact that most of your runs are dependent on a green skeleton knight not spawning in, and the esoteric method to actually landing a critical hit on the boss makes the entire fight a long, ridiculous chore. let's not forget that you have to complete the fight after a whole zone's worth of enemies while playing as the second-most fragile character in the game. but even when playing as a less fragile character the fight is only marginally less cumbersome.

also, whose idea was it to make the final boss move like a BAT

the dam broke when i fought the golden lute. all at once i had the thought of "why the fuck am i even doing any of this?" i was having mild fun, but the game spat in my mouth and told me i'd be having way more fun playing the game with my skin flayed off.

what's that? the amplified dlc? yeah, it's alright. i don't understand why some basic QoL features that werent dependent on dlc content had to be locked behind the dlc, but whatever. nocturna is pretty powerful, which works well for the difficulty of the dlc. frankensteinway and the conductor are both very difficult final bosses, but im not playing a character made of paper. zone 5 works well as an evolution of the dungeon crawler aspect of the game while, as per usual, not doing much for the rhythm game aspect. it's fine, like i said. more fun than the base game.

i think the song's about to end, so i'll just let it run out and ill drop into a new rogueli--

SONG ENDED!