Recent reviews by Knightly Knave

This game starts with a pop up telling you that A is jump and then tells you that X is attack. But, never once does it say how to equip and use healing items. I'm fine if the game wants me to just learn as I go, but then why in the world would you give me such an obvious pop up about A being jump. A is always jump. But, knowing how to heal would have made that first boss significantly easier.
The pixel art is good, the voice acting is alright. But, it just comes across as too try hard. It just seems like the gothic aesthetic is just for the sake of being edgy, not because it's actually a creative decision like with Blasphemous. Also, the fact that so many boss attacks have a huge area of effect around where they actually hit is not cool. The point of learning boss attacks is watching their attack, but how am I supposed to predict where there will be huge damage spikes in addition to where their weapon hits except by being hit by it a bunch of times.
Also, instant death spike pits all over the place for almost every jump? In a souls-like? No thanks.
The fact that you have to travel to a quest giver to level up instead of just at every save point is just extra busy work.
Just nothing comes together with this one.

A great little visual novel musical. I've never thought of the concept of a musical video game like this before but it works really well. The only drawback is that the music isn't actually that great and some of the transitions are a bit awkward. Otherwise, the plot of Greek gods living in modern times is extremely engaging and the voice acting (and singing) is excellent. The romance options are also quite satisfying and I it seems like it has a fair bit of replay value in that you can throw your lot in with two different factions and see some fairly difference scenes due to it. Give it a try!

I'm going to give it a thumbs up because clearly a lot of love and passion went into it. But, this game has some serious problems, there were several times when it glitched and I couldn't interact with anything and I had to reload. The mini-games get incredibly difficult as time goes on and since there's only a few of them that's not much fun. Maybe making the "work" not fun is part of the theme but I didn't much care for it. It almost seemed like some of them were actually not responding properly to inputs (such as the line graph one). The ending also goes from being a compelling narrative that says a lot without directly saying it to a complete melodrama in the end. I would have given that ending another pass.
That said the game does touch on some important issues about healthcare and does make you empathize with the profession. It also creates a very believable anthopromorphized world and the characters are all believable and well written. The art is also perfect in every way, beautiful and expressive.

A pretty solid strategy game. Since it's free to play there's no reason not to try it, no micro transactions or DLC to worry about. It's pretty difficult and relies a bit too much on RNG for my liking but otherwise it's got some solid placement and economy based troop building. The graphics are pretty simple, while the sprites for the characters are charming I found the actual backgrounds sometimes a bit hard to read. Luckily, there is a way to just get stats with links to the glossary for anything you want to click on. Lots of variety in types of units. The plot in the individual scenarios is also surprisingly entertaining and drives the action forward. If you're interested in strategy games at all, give this a look.

Very off putting from the start. Weird anime tropes in a sci-fi setting. The characters models are all so stiff. The action is very slow as well, once we landed on the first planet it took forever to trigger the next cut scene. Not really anything to like in the first hour so I'm not going to play the remaining 49 hours.

It's simple but effective. It has good atmosphere, mostly from the soundscape and the line art drawings. It really makes you focus and double check your work, nothing is worse than taking a dangerous journey only to realize you didn't bring enough with you to build what you need to when you get there. The 6 hours I played my first journey flew by. But, now that I'm done there isn't much to go back for. What it could have used is unlockable characters with unique abilities like with the pilots in Into the Breech.

I really wanted to like this game. I like so called "walking simulators" but there's not even much walking in this one. You are stuck in only a few rooms for hours. The voice acting is good but otherwise there's not much to do besides occasional puzzles. These puzzles start out okay but gradually get more and more difficult until you are losing each of them. The plot continues on but it's really not a very good feeling to constantly be getting people killed. I think a conversation history would have been helpful if you missed an important detail there's no real way to go back and hear it again. I wouldn't be as upset by failing the puzzles if there was anything else to do in the game but there really isn't.

It's fine but after playing The Messenger it's just not very impressive. The music is kind of annoying, not really doing what chip tune music is good at. However, the pixel art is very nice, especially the redone backgrounds. The plot is a bit strange, are the artefacts bad or is the empress bad? I feel like we could have just done with one or the other. But the big problem is that it just feels unwieldy. I get the switching mechanic but having to train your brain to think that you have to click an extra button before you jump or you dash doesn't feel good. I do give them credit for the easier mode by holding LB, that's a nice touch. It's not objectionable, it just didn't wow me and with so many games to choose from on Steam, it does really need to wow me to keep playing.

An interesting premise both in plot and in gameplay. It's mostly a visual novel but you do get branching trees to decide what to do next and can even see vague details about what those branching paths might lead to, so sometimes it's wise to stop and calculate what you might need to do to reach a final goal you want rather than only thinking about what the next step is. The voice acting is excellent, the art is very nice as well. The actual plot is very metaphysical and I was turned off by it initially but it grew on me over time. I think there may have wanted to be a bit more time warming the player up, and at the mid point there's a crisis that happens that also went on for too long without much gameplay input besides clicking "next scene". Otherwise, if you don't mind a visual novel experience it's very good.

The idea of a plant being from outer space being your hub zone and you're just created from it is great. The voice acting is excellent. Pretty much everything else about this is awful. I think it's trying to be a much worse Hades? But, it feels bad to play, it's floaty and imprecise. The streets (which is almost the only zone in the game) is terrible, it's just all browns and reds. The gameplay loop is not satisfying - the fact that you get curses making you worse for doing better is terrible - the fact that if you run out of cards in your deck your level ups do nothing. There's also not that many zones, so you're constantly seeing the same areas over and over again. It's a real shame the overarching plot of this couldn't be put in a game I actually want to play.