But it’s difficult to see why exactly because this part of the game functions rather badly. The game makes continual references to hide and seek, obviously quite proud of this part of itself. If you don’t hide at all and run into one of the guests then exactly the same thing happens as if they’d caught you hiding, you lose time. Whether they do or not seems to be almost completely random. If they don’t, then they disappear, if they do then the screen shakes about a bit and you lose some of the time you collected. At that point, the only way you have of dealing with them is to hide behind some object and hope that they don’t spot you. They burrow through the wall, enter your house, and wander around looking for you. Apparently these creatures of the night, which take some of the weirdest forms you could imagine, are attracted to your house by the light. The threat in the game comes in the form of the “guests”. Apart from some sparsely distributed dynamic comic segments which give you the tiniest taste of a storyline, each level is almost exactly the same as the last except a little bigger. When the dawn arrives, the level ends and you pass to the next one. When you pick up a clock, time – displayed in the top-left of the screen – whizzes forward a set amount and you get closer to dawn. The majority of your game time is spent creeping slowly through a large dark empty house turning on light bulbs and picking up clocks. Unfortunately all of this starts to rapidly unravel after just an hour or so into the game when you realise the core gameplay mechanics are simplistic, repetitive, tedious, somewhat random, and completely unsatisfying. You wander about the house doing things, you hear noises, you get a few jump scares, you think to yourself that the piano music and ambient sound effects are pretty cool, and you have a genuinely high level of intrigue to get to the bottom of just what the heck is actually going on. Then the game starts and you discover that you play as a rather bizarre looking red-haired hermit.Īt first it seems like there’s actually something to the game. There’s then a confusing but styled comic intro which doesn’t really make any sense, of course by this point you still think it’ll all come together in the end so it has the cool mysterious feel which all good horror games have. Someone tattooed “sucker” on my forehead. Then you are presented with a recommendation to play the game alone and in the dark – which, by the way, I did. It’s the typical start to a Halloween folktale.
The instructions insisted on certain things being present in the game, but that the actual gameplay itself could be designed in any way the developers wished.
#Knockknock game series#
The game begins with a comment that the game was built according to a series of mysterious instructions sent to the game dev studio. Occasionally the hermit speaks, offering glimmerings of hope that the game actually has a story No matter what way I look at it, I’m pretty sure I’m still missing the advantages of this supposed design decision. In the developer’s own words: ”knock-knock is not a game as such.” As it happens, that is something I can mainly agree with, but probably not for the reasons the devs had intended. Perhaps it is this lack of clarity pervading throughout every nook and cranny of the game itself which is the reason that I myself am still rather confused as to exactly what this game is and why most people would actually want to play it. Knock-knock doesn’t even know what type of game to call itself on the official website, although it hints at being some kind of survival horror with mysterious elements. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but unfortunately with this particular attempt I’m afraid it might well be.
Their latest effort Knock-knock – a kick-started effort clearly meant to capitalise on spook sales at Halloween – is most certainly not a return to planet Earth for these guys. Their back catalogue includes the relatively well acclaimed and somewhat Myst-like The Void, and the absolutely bizarre 3D puzzle platform adventure Cargo!.
When it comes to Ice Pick Lodge, an independent game studio from Russia, I suppose we should know that we’re in for a wacky ride.
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