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27.11.2023 - 21:23 / destructoid.com
It’s kind of amazing how much influence Mother 3 has had on game design in the West, despite never being released here. It’s a bit hard to describe the difference between Earthbound influence and Mother 3 influence, but it’s there. Knuckle Sandwich seems to be in the Mother 3 camp.
Actually, Knuckle Sandwich is a bit of a mash-up of Mother 3, Undertale (which was also inspired by Mother 3), and WarioWare. At times, it seems to push the concept to the extremes. Other times, it wallows in it.
Knuckle Sandwich is mixed. How much you enjoy it is going to depend on your tolerance for its pacing, and if its weirdness and humor are enough for you to overlook some glaring flaws.
Knuckle Sandwich (PC)
Developer: Andy Brophy
Publisher: Superhot Presents
Released: November 22, 2023
MSRP: $19.99
You’re a hapless loser. You can’t hold down a job, you screw up everything you do, and people just keep taking advantage of your naivety.
Sorry, I’m talking about the protagonist of Knuckle Sandwich. I’m sure you’re lovely.
After moving to Bright City, the protagonist sets out to find a job and winds up with no end of bad luck. One thing leads to another, and a blue-skinned vampire is asking you to help figure out what keeps causing corruption in the city. Then it generally meanders about pointlessly.
Let me tell you, Knuckle Sandwich has one hell of an opening. For the first hour or so, you’re kicked around through a varied bunch of events, each one more subversive than the last. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but for a while there, I was thinking that this could be a late contender for some sort of Game of the Year award. I would say I was “grinning the whole way through” if I was still capable of feeling any sort of joy.
You might say that it kept going off script or, rather, that it never had a script at all. And then eventually, it finds its script, and everything comes screeching to a sudden halt.
While the early moments of Knuckle Sandwich might give you the impression that this is a parody RPG, it’s a bit misleading. This is just an RPG. Well, it’s not just an RPG, but it’s sunk so deeply in the genre that it’s more an RPG than it is anything else. You spend a lot of time in dungeons, solving simple puzzles and lining up to take turns swatting at enemies.
The big difference here is that each time you attack or defend, there’s a simple mini-game to decide how much damage you deal or receive. If you can nail a defense mini-game, it will cause damage to the enemy instead. There’s a vast assortment of mini-games, which is one of Knuckle Sandwich’s strengths. It doesn’t just rely on the abstract comparison of dice rolls and stat points; it provides something unique each time.
In many ways, this is yanked from Undertale
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