Games I Want to Love - Knight Witch (Part 1)
A civilization sustaining itself on the substances produced from the dead, a genius inventor who wants to settle a new planet and abandon the current one, and a main character that agonizes over the responsibility she has to others versus herself are just a few of the themes that make this game's setting so compelling.
Knight Witch is a (deep breath) deck-building, bullet hell, side-scrolling, narrative-focused Metroidvania. None of the mechanics are particularly deep, as expected with so much crossover, but it's well-polished and executes pretty well on each of those genres. It oozes attention to detail. Gorgeous backgrounds, thematic set pieces, and fantastic level theming add a layer of worldbuilding that isn't usually seen in narrative-driven games. Sprites are bright and colorful, and the portraiture evokes visual novels, with over-the-top expressions and cute character interactions.
But behind the mask of a cheerful anime-esque art style and character interaction hides a strong political commentary, how you belief in yourself, and a teardown of heroes and idolization.
Knight Witch throws you into the climatic battle of the last major war, controlling the captain of the Knight Witches as they tackle the final stronghold of an enemy that represents progress at all costs; a family that has brought amazing technical advancements but at the cost of the health of the planet. The sky is scarred, the surface barren, and it is implied that the war has accelerated all of these challenges.
After a short tutorial section and timeskip, you're introduced to the main bulk of the game - a society living underground where they're safe from the ravages of the surface, living amongst the ruins of an ancient, dead civilization of giants that used magical Hexoil to power machinery.
Rayne, the actual main character, is living a humble life, trying to help her neighbors and contribute to society while the shadow of being a "failed" fifth Knight Witch hangs over her. Naturally, the idyllic peace is shattered, Rayne is forced to answer the call, and immediately sets out to save as many people as she can.
Here Knight Witch introduces a theme beautifully - your Link to others, how much they believe in you, gives you power. The more people you rescue and the more good deeds you do, the more powerful you become. Mechanically, this is a kind of XP bar, but is represented by a chain growing, and the pause menu makes clear how strongly people believe in you is directly tied to what you can accomplish.
Because of this, you're quickly made an official Knight Witch, as the others are missing and you're clearly capable. But, Super Mega Team took it a bit further - if people's belief is literally empowering, then controlling the narrative and pushing propaganda is not just a matter of rallying the population to a cause, but potentially a matter of life and death. You're quickly introduced to the benevolent dictator of the society and a propagandist, who has you give press conferences and coaches you on what to say beforehand. During each, you're asked leading questions and are given an option: stretch the truth or deflect from the issue or share your side of the story, without filters. Lying, or soothing the population, usually empowers you more than giving clear details about situations.
I love this idea so much. Taking the natural consequence of a world's magical abilities to the next level is something I wish more stories did.
As it progresses, though, it becomes readily apparent that more forces are at work than mere people and no one quite understands how any of the forces they toy with work.
Setting Spoilers and Discussion
You see, it turns out that the magical substance that the society runs on, Hexoil, is extracted from the dead. Since the ancient civilization that you're living around was made up of giants, and their dead seem to be neatly contained below the city, there's a large, readily-accessible supply of Hexoil available for use in all sorts of things like water purification, air recycling, and war machines.
Later, your currency is revealed to be crystalized Hexoil, and that many of the large orbs that are powering machinery are the sarcophogi of this ancient civilization. The usage of Hexoil is tearing open a hole in the fabric of reality, and more and more monsters are seeping through, quickly replacing the war machines as an enemy in later sections.
Very little of the setting gets explored through the narrative. Most areas have some fantastic background art that really fleshes out the history of the world. What I originally thought were swords in the ground around battlefields on later inspection appeared to be syringes, opening the question of whether the planet was destroyed by trying to sustain it using Hexoil. You meet a mummified king of the ancients late in the game who desires for Hexoil crystals, and laments the state of things, but disappears quickly, and in at least one other area, there are the remains of a giant battle that is so old, everything is a skeleton.
You're given an option to upgrade your save locations throughout the game, letting you take an extra hit. The save point turns from a shining blue to the same sickly green as the Hexoil, and a quest later lets you purify them, but there seems to be no disadvantage to "upgrading" them in this way, and while purifying them removes that advantage, there's no impact one way or another on the narrative. Once I realized what it was doing, I did my best not to upgrade any further save points, in the hopes that it would be a "hidden" sort of moral choice that would impact the story in some way, but it fizzled.
It also becomes clear through a series of hidden notes that the Knight Witches aren't "special" in any way. Only the belief in them is, so anyone could become more powerful based on how people view them. While it also potentially requires gratitude towards the target, it is still implied to be fairly easy to "misuse" and so the knowledge of this is to be squashed by the powers-that-be.
But it also raises other questions around, say, the main political leader of the society - why doesn't he have any power other than political? While we're led to doubt his actions (though not his intentions), his decisions are never implied to have been destructive or entirely self-serving, and so mechanically, shouldn't he also grow in ability, especially since he is aware that there is no other magical item that "enables" the Link?
I want to see more of this world, but I'm concerned about how the tone clashes with the main story.
Rayne is good almost to a fault, and while the game would seem to impose consequences for "doing the right thing," there's a device in another room in the hub area that you can feed your currency into like a woodchipper that makes up for the difference in Link you could have gained through the press conferences.
There are characters you rescue or come to doubt, but you're given no option to do anything about those doubts, as they're either dismissed outright or you're railroaded into the next section. Rayne refuses to kill (autonomous war golems don't count), and characters discuss the need to kill other living beings during the first war, and that it's not something that can be avoided, even if it's morally dubious.
So much of the context of the story sets up these major issues of ethics and morality, but none of your decisions ultimately matter. You end up a pawn in other people's schemes, and while you right wrongs, very few people seem to suffer or benefit as a result of your actions. If the tone of the dialog wasn't somewhat goofy or cliched, I'd talk about this as being a brilliant example of ludonarrative dissonance driving home core themes around exploitation and hero worship, but instead it just comes off as feeling disjointed, as though two people had very different visions of the game and couldn't reconcile before launch.
Ending Discussion
There's so many "twists" leading up to the final boss that I lost sight of the character motivations. By the end, most characters wanted to sweep all of the events under the rug and had a fatalistic approach towards repairing the wrongs of the past, and I couldn't tell whether this was genius and emphasized the comparisons to our current situation here on Earth or whether it was just sloppy storytelling to get to the next thing, or produce a game that needed to get shipped.
If my count is right, you end up fighting "three" final bosses, but the "main" antagonist is none of them. The actual final boss feels like such a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere that part of me writing all of this is to try processing it.
The usage of Hexoil is ripping a tear to the void. In the void, you find the goddess Gaia, who is also powered by the Link, but the boss is represented as the Link being a straightjacket that you're fighting. But there are eyes that pop in and out of the battlefield that represent... what? There were clearly monsters earlier in the game that were from or corrupted by the void, and this final boss ("Hextinction") is so abstract that it feels like it's from an entirely different game.
I want to talk about the themes around the Link being two ways and that, while empowering, it means that you're beholden to people. I want to talk about how absolute power can corrupt and turn good intentions bad. I want to talk about the cycle of life and death and rebirth that the game hints at a few times, because all of the pieces are there! But with what's been shown, it's hard to know which was intentional and is me reading into it.
For instance, I adore how on-the-nose the game is about an environmentalism message. Early on the game mentions an ecoterrorist group with good goals but failed to win over the populace, and how market research went into the creation of the Knight Witches. Framing our current struggles in the context of a cheery (well, maybe) world and showing how shaping a message can influence an outcome feels like such a vitally important point that people miss right now.
In the "Bad" ending, Rayne returns home to live out the next few years in peace as others struggle to avoid problems that they have significant warning for. She agonizes over whether there was more that she could have done and the ending is left ambiguous as to everyone's future.
But instead, if you fight to do more in the "Good" ending, Rayne still sacrifices nothing. She struggles against overwhelming odds and fights for what she feels is right and is rewarded for it. The moral foils that are other characters seem to learn a lesson and change their lives for the better (albeit in the background). But as a player, it feels like wrapping up too many loose ends too quickly.
Arguably there's no real closure to the good ending. Rayne replaces (rebirths as?) Gaia, taking on the caretaker role for the planet. But the sky is repaired, the void hole is closed, and the society quickly scraps its need for Hexoil. For a game that has dug into the nature of responsibility towards others so strongly, I feel like it only scratches the surface of what Rayne's role and struggles are now while trying to balance the circular nature of life.
The nature of good and evil, via in-group and out-group mechanics, as a tool for societal control is a tale as old as any organized group of people. There are very few "evil" characters in Knight Witch, and even the most heinous among them deep down believe that they're doing the right thing.
Most of the characters you meet are merely some form of apathetic. They may care about the conflict, but they don't want to think about it or feel powerless to do anything. One character is powerful, but functionally a pacifist, whereas another character shrewdly interprets what the Link represents and refuses to support you, due to the two-way nature of it.
All media is a reflection of the society that produced it. I want more games like this. I want to think more about how we can better society together with differing ideas and understand each other before simply acting, but I also think it's important to recognize that actions may have destructive consequences.
After all, a knight without purpose is just a mercenary, retribution without justice is just aggression, and a hero without a following is just a person.