Games I Want to Love - Knight Witch (Part 2)
Welcome back!
Theme and Story discussions can be found in Part 1. This will focus on the game mechanics and will contain spoilers for almost all of the mechanics, but will try to avoid plot spoilers.
The game opens at the end of a war. The Knight Witches are assaulting the final stronghold, and you play as Robyn, their leader. This intro is the taste of power before you start at zero again, intended to give the player a goal. Robyn's attacks and spells are devastating and you'll make short work of the boss and even shorter work of the mooks leading up to it. The fights are not particularly complex, but you're introduced very quickly to the bullet hell combat of the game, as the boss fires many waves of projectiles. They're all fairly slow, though, which gives you the sense of a powerful struggle, even though the difficulty is kept reasonable.
Fast-forwarding, plot-wise, the next thirty minutes introduce you to Rayne, a former Knight Witch trainee and give you more time to learn the main mechanics. Rayne fires bullets at enemies while you aim with the second joystick, with a neutral stick position auto-targetting the nearest enemy with slightly reduced damage. Spellcasting is represented by the top three face buttons, and you gain mana for spellcasting by defeating enemies. Movement is fluid and responsive; Rayne accelerates and changes direction very quickly.
This combo feels great! You can focus more on dodging bullets than aiming if you need to, and the precision seen in other bullet hell games is present here - once you understand your hitbox, you can squeeze through small gaps in waves of bullets. Especially during the early portion of the game, you're given time and space to learn enemy patterns and the screen is rarely so full of enemies that you're forced to take a hit.
However, there's one major drawback: the spells you can cast are drawn at random from a pool and change on a cast. Attention is constantly split between the middle of the screen for positioning awareness, and the lower right of the screen for available spells. Each spell costs some amount of mana, with current mana shown below.
This is excruciating.
Developer commentary is that this is to keep things fresh and to urge you to try different combinations, rather than falling into one pattern for the entire game, but the deck you pick is small enough to filter to a given playstyle anyway. I went for a very powerful and mana hungry build throughout the game, which relied on me obtaining as much mana from enemies as possible. It worked well for my playstyle and with the game offering duplicate cards, meant I almost always had the spells I wanted. But even then, there were combos that just didn't work, or times where I was stuck waiting for the "right" card.
It's so close to being an amazing system. The spell design is varied, the suite of tools you have matches a variety of playstyles, and there are clearly some very cool combos you can build. But the UI placement means that the randomness actively takes away from the rest of the game they're trying to build.
I wonder if it would have been better to have a system where you could slot two cards to a button and it swapped between them as you cast, or even have six options using a trigger to modulate, and a spell would get progressively more expensive the more you used it in a short timespan. Anything other than randomness. Even having a clear indicator in the middle of the screen of the next draw, or maybe the mana pool around the aiming reticule would have done so much for the game. The UI is uncluttered already, to help with the bullet hell aspect.
Knight Witch is colorful and bright. The themes are dark, but the tone tries to remain goofy and resolute. The art style reflects this - an incredible amount of detail exists in backgrounds and "non-interactable" objects, and backgrounds tell a story that the game rarely touches. But, sprites don't always stand out, as they aren't always noticeably brighter than the surrounding scenery. The bullets they shoot certainly do stand out, but I found that sometimes it would take me a few moments to scan the scene for new enemies, even though I'd already done that. The music supports combat and letting you know what's happening, and it's competently produced, but I found in unmemorable beyond the overall experience of the game.
Unfortunately, what stuck with me were the places where the with me and really detracted from the story and gameplay.
"Ludonarrative Dissonance" loves to rear its ugly head in these kinds of articles, and I'll touch on it for just a bit. In Part 1, I talk about the decisions you make, lying to the population or not, and the game presents it very starkly - if you lie, you can gain more experience points that are directly tied to power. However, in a room two screens over, you can functionally just pay money to get more experience anyway. It's capped, but it takes away all consequences for your decisions. As a game that really seems to want you to look deeper at it, I'm frustrated that they didn't commit.
Speaking of frustrating, there is a water level, and it's not good. The gimmick of the area is that you can enter buildings which put you in a submarine and move through the water. Fine idea... except that the submarine isn't as navigable as Rayne and can only fire projectiles left or right. There are puzzles that take advantage of this, but since it's taking away abilities you already had, it just comes off as annoying and finnicky. The achievements even reference it! Completing the area awards an achievement named "The Water Level."
An Aside on Games Development
The water level is an area that really showcases how hard game development can be. If you're late into development and already have art assets lined up for a section, then it can be hard to make a call to scrap those assets for something else. Even if you make the decision to, that can mean months of work that's no longer valid and set back your release schedule. In an industry that moves as quickly from thing to thing as gaming, that can be a death sentence for your game, and you might not even have the budget to delay release longer than a few weeks.
I point this out because if they had scrapped it, then what would be in its place? The game "feels" short already (I have 13 hours in it), and if they had to scrap an entire area and redevelop it? Or worse yet, take it out completely? Then that would exascerbate the problem even more!
This is a hard problem even in software that has ongoing support, and early architectural or design decisions can impact things much later down the road. Sometimes the best you can do is try to polish what you have and make it the best with the limitations you've self-imposed, and Knight Witch absolutely sparkles with polish.
Speaking of completion, the progression of the game is excellent, though. I had a note for this article about "Imposter syndrome, the game" and I think that holds - Rayne is unsure of herself the entire time, doubting whether she's good enough to accomplish what needs to be done, while believing that she is trying to do the right thing. The progression is so smooth that I was deep into the final areas of the game before I'd realized how much Rayne had grown and how much more powerful she was than the intro sequence with Robyn. Later boss fights absolutely bring more challenge and the feeling of learning patterns and getting through a combat unscathed or quickly was great.
But, the final boss felt like it threw all of that out the window. Spoilers ahead for the ending boss.
Final Boss Spoilers
I hate the final boss. The game progression is so smooth and clear, and the difficulty level for me was just right, that the final boss feels like a slap in the face. It's visually stunning - the fight takes place in a void - and the boss itself is bright green. It stands in strong contrast to the rest of the game's detail, and I think is clearly intended to be a set piece.
However, the boss feels too random. I must have easily had 30 attempts at it, and I could not figure out what the patterns were of the different adds in the fight. I suspect there might be some pattern, but I couldn't figure it out, even when trying to just pay attention to them. I also couldn't tell when they respawned, or if I was "clearing" them at all, since they teleport randomly around the arena. The health bar of the boss is also much larger than any other boss.
My approach to combat at that point had been large spells and I almost felt like I cheesed the boss in the end - since the boss' hitbox does not cause damage, you can fly right into the middle of it and cast a spell that has lots of projectiles. This was doing almost half of (one of) the boss' health bar in damage. Every other strategy I tried just felt like I was slogging through the fight and making no progress. I could go out on a limb and say that it's intentional, whether an intended "treat" for gamers or a narrative message about struggle and duty, but instead it just comes off as poorly designed and balanced.
Finally, the sequence that includes the final boss is one you get locked into. You can change your loadout, but you no longer have any ability to upgrade your character or get more duplicates of cards. If you're underpowered going into that final fight, you will remain woefully unprepared and there's nothing you can do other than load a save that you backed up earlier.
There's so much attention put into it, though, that it feels like this can't be unintended. It's probably my biggest gripe about the game and soured what was otherwise a great experience.
Since the ending includes a difficulty spike, and the bullet hell genre as a whole is hard if you don't have good reflexes or hand-eye coordination, it's worth mentioning the in-game "Accessibility" options. The menu and game present them as cheats, and they are locked behind a sequence of characters. As best I can tell, you either have to look them up online or brute force them, as there is no in-game way to unlock them.
However, once you unlock them, you're free to turn them on and off. They don't disable achievements, and it means that if you're having trouble with a particular section, you can enable it for a bit and then disable it again.
While I dislike that what are becoming considered Accessibility options are hidden in such a way, I really appreciate that they exist here at all. Too many games are inaccessible to people that want to enjoy them, but can't for any variety of reasons (whether skill, time, physical ability, etc.). Some of them are helpful rather than "game-breaking," so you don't even have to completely remove the fun or challenge from the game while using them.
Knight Witch is absolutely a game you should try. I want to support more devs doing interesting things with game mechanics and story, and I think that art pieces like this push the medium forward and give us more space to talk about both gaming as a hobby and society as a whole.
However, the randomness of the spell system and the inconsistencies of the tone and story mean that I only enjoyed it, rather than loved it.