This game thinks it's way funnier than it actually is, and thinks its gameplay is way more enthralling than it actually is. What we actually have here is a game that obviously draws inspiration from Earthbound and WarioWare (and is aware of, but trying not to be, Undertale or Deltarune), but doesn't understand the appeal of those games. It thinks Earthbound's appeal is just "JRPG but it's set in a fantastical version of our modern world with zany antics galore" and it thinks WarioWare's appeal is just "minigames with zany themes that may or may not be related to the setting." The end result is a JRPG with slow, annoying combat that relies on regular enemies being huge HP sponges so you have to see all the cool wacky minigames that the dev has made, often with them getting a free turn on you even when you outspeed them. In between, you have mostly-uninteresting overworld exploration that has a snail's pace even when you're running, which wrings out more gameplay hours from you despite using an overworld that's smaller than most GBA RPGs (and some GBC ones!), with lots of annoying unskippable cutscenes of unfunny characters saying zany stuff and then prompting you to laugh at it by either just saying stuff like "WHAT." or "WOAH!" or "well, that was weird/that just happened/that was confusing, anyway let's move on" or just looking directly at the screen as a 4th wall break, like it's begging you to clap, all while teleporting around the room instead of walking because the creator thinks that visual gag is really funny and won't get stale after several hours. Speaking of visual gags, the game uses the patheticness of your protagonist and his obvious signs of suffering from chronic depression as a visual gag; in fact, much of the humor is bursting with "person who never grew out of their 'lol so randum xD' phase and is now making games about young adult life and depression" vibes.

It's not like there aren't some funny jokes or interesting concepts going on. There are some genuinely creative puns that got a chuckle out of me. I like action prompts in my turn based RPGs, usually, and with a couple exceptions, at least when it comes to your own attacks they're actually pretty good in this game. The RPG combat in this game is bad because of the enemies and the way encounters play out in practice: enemies getting a free turn on you way too often, having huge health pools, doing tons of damage to you sometimes, the presentation having lots of fanfare and animation padding that makes every encounter slower to play out, plus lots of the minigames taking longer than WarioWare's healthy tempo of 3-6 seconds per game. You could take (most of) the player's side of the equation and put it up against a different entire combat system design and it would actually be pretty good; ironically, it would work well in Deltarune.

Incidentally, for a game that prides itself on having lots of minigames, its fishing minigame is among the worst in the entirety of video games. I don't get the internet's obsession with fishing minigames; personally, I hate them, the only one I've ever remotely enjoyed was in Link's Awakening and that's one that you can 100% in like 2-3 minutes. But even people who will unironically say "it has fishing, 5/5, GOTYAY" will find this one disappointing. It is barely more involved than fishing in Pokemon, it's entirely luck-based, and it requires you to find fishing bait (a rare item) and the fishing NPC (who moves around and isn't even available until midgame) to even play. Oh yeah and if you play it and fish up something bad, the bait still gets used up, even if you fished up a boot. It seems like this is the one minigame that the dev intentionally made bad.

There's also just basic RPG stuff being fumbled. You have a tiny inventory, so tiny that the dev had to patch in an "extra pocket" but that barely helps. Even with the extra pocket, it's less inventory space than the original Pokemon games, AND it doesn't have inventory stacking. Much of the early game is an exercise in tedious inventory management, and you better not throw away any non-consumable items, because most of them are needed for side quests or easter eggs or just straight up actual main quest content later in the story! So you're gonna be handed tons of consumables that you have to just toss out. Undertale used its small inventory space as a way to make the game more challenging, but it didn't expect you to hang on to all early game items forever. The inventory storage computers you get access to later don't categorize or sort items, it's just FIFO, so you'll be scrolling through dozens of items just to withdraw the thing you put in there last. There are also plenty of permanently misssable encounters and items. Probably worst of all, it commits the cardinal sin of having party members join and leave with no warning, and taking everything they had on them with them, and not giving you the party member back for 5+ hours of gameplay. You don't even get a proper "party" until you're about 2/3rds of the way through the game. Let me put this in perspective: I try my hardest to finish games that have something going on for them, even if they're mostly crap. It took me over 10 hours to get to the point where I was given an actual party where you could swap members. During that time, I think I enjoyed maybe 1 out of 10 of those hours of gameplay. Now, it is more of a mixed bag, I'm enjoying it a bit more, but if 2/3rds of the game is mostly annoying and barely enjoyable, can you really give it a good rating?

Other complaints: unless there's something I missed, I think you need audio to be able to hear a bunch of attack telegraphs for dodge timings, and a couple attacks also require you to not be colorblind to dodge them, which are sensory accessibility issues. Some attacks also require button mashing, which is a mobility accessibility issue. I don't think the dev can fix their terrible sense of humor or their awful script, but maybe they can at least fix this.

I plan to finish this game eventually because I'm just like that, but man, it is really disappointing. I had high hopes for it. It's trying so hard, but fumbling everything.

Edit: finished it. Ending was serviceable. I'll add half a star.

this is the most difficult negative review i've given.

it's so hard to say that i think this game is kind of mediocre, because so, so, SO much of it is worth your time that i think its worth people looking at regardless of quality.

i'll try to be clinical about this one, but first ill address the issue i have with the game that is sort of the root of many disappointments i have with the game: the hook.

it's not fair. i know it's not fair to judge a game for what it isn't rather than what it is. i know i wanted the game to be about you killing people and serving them as hamburgers because that's what the end of the demo implied. i know i wanted to see a story that was ABOUT keeping these horrible things from your three co-workers and the guilt that tore you up inside over it. the warioware sensibilities themselves would be almost a cruel mockery of what you did. the world stays twee and quirky despite the horrible thing you did.

but it wasn't about that. frankly, i don't think it was about anything.

right, clinical.

This game is exceptional in quite a few areas, and nearly all of them involve the game's audiovisual presentation.

The soundtrack, done by Andy himself along with nelward, the Gyms, Joe Aquiare, Barchboi and lizzy are all fantastic. Despite the wide range of composers, none of them ever felt out of place in any given situation. They all fit the surreal and absurd world of Knuckle Sandwich like a glove.

The visual style, the graphics, everything is presented with such candy-coated sweetness that even remembering some of the game's more questionable sections, I also remember how visually captivating the game's battle UI is, or the silly clay animations whenever you find a goblin, or even just the random, rainbow colored NPCs that speak gibberish to you. So much of this game is so, so wonderful to experience in the moment.

The game's combat centers around microgames, timed attacks, and timed dodges. I think the game succeeds at approximately 85-90% of the microgames, while the attack and dodge system never felt wrong to me. The game continually spices up the basic attack command through three different variants, all of which felt very satisfying to pull off (I got a x28 combo with the circle attack. Thank you, Hatsune Miku, for training me). The timed dodges, too, never felt non-intuitive. The moment I figured out an enemy's tell, I could always dodge their basic attacks.

ah

i really don't want to keep going

i really wish i could just stop and leave it there

it'd be so easy

but

There are two pillars of problems with Knuckle Sandwich as a game. That being its game design and its story.

Knuckle Sandwich's game design issues are cumulative in nature. A lot of small issues coagulating into major problems that make the gamefeel incredibly unusual. I'll list them here:

- Stat values feel almost entirely meaningless with the exception of your speed. This is the root of many of the game's issues regarding gamefeel.
- Buffing and debuffing skills, for the very few that exist, barely make any impact as a result.
- There is no skill that allows you to lower an enemy's Defense. This is a problem because of a point I will address later.
- There is no consistent curve of enemy Defense values, which means your attacks will rapidly oscillate between doing 20 damage to one enemy and then doing 1 damage to the next.
- There are never any shops when you actually need shops. I accumulated vast amounts of Fortune Rocks and rarely ever used them.
- The inventory system is genuinely abysmal. Each party member is given eight slots. The items that take up space include consumables, equipment, and key items.
- Armor and Weapons rarely make a significant difference in combat.
- Boss fights are more or less scripted encounters where the boss exhausts all of their dialogue and either reduces their Defense value drastically, or they remove the RPG elements entirely and just have the fight be a completely different game.
- Even in boss fights without these scripted elements, they are oftentimes meat sponges that will take upwards to fifteen turns to beat. This, to me, is unacceptable.
- The damage dealt by your special moves is oftentimes worse than your standard attack. Even if you perfect the microgame, you can easily outdo the damage without the EP cost by doing your timed attack.
- The defend action only recovers a single point of EP. This is completely worthless and only serves to waste an action.
- The only healing skill in the game heals 11 HP. This is almost completely worthless.
- Once you acquire all three party members, you cannot swap them out in combat if your party member has fallen. This, to me, defeats the point of that system.
- I only got one skill that afflicts a status effect. It never afflicted it once.
- Status effects feel meaningless when applied to enemies.

All of these issues are either the root of an issue or are the resulting issue. Even the novelty of new microgames with every fight wears thin when every fight feels at least two turns too long and there are so few skills I can use to meaningfully accelerate the rate of combat. It's hard to prepare for any given fight because there's so few equipment, and what equipment does exist barely makes a difference. I don't even want to use skills because the damage they do barely means anything, and there's a decent chance that doing high damage barely even matters in a boss fight anyways.

Perhaps it is a commentary on my lack of agency in the story. Let's talk about what the story actually is.

The game's hook, as I mentioned before, is perfect. After arriving in Bright City and going on a gameshow in an attempt to find a job, you are completely unqualified for anything and are forced to go elsewhere. You end up going to Gorilla Burger, a terrible fast food joint. At the end of the night, you're attacked by a knife-wielding gangster while taking out the trash, and you end up killing him. After the game's surrealism, this was a lurch. Even more of a lurch is when your boss witnesses a murder, and decides the best course of action is to cook him. It ends with him patenting this horrific act of cannibalism as the world's first...

Knuckle Sandwich.

It's flawless. It's immaculate. It doesn't come up again until the last hour of the game.

The actual story is that Bright City is in danger due to some sort of Anomaly. It's causing the world to go out of whack, and you need to figure out who's causing it. The problem is that a lot of people think that you're the Anomaly, and are trying to get rid of you as a result. There's also a group called the Brightfangs who have their own agenda. It's fairly self-evident early on that they are extremists working towards an ultimately positive end, and the people you and your co-workers ostensibly trust are actually not very trustworthy.

Oh, right. You deliver some food to a stupid billionaire named Mr. Apricot. He's useless, but you assume he's just some guy. There's also someone named Xander. He's a justice cop. He dies and was a stooge of the real villain, the gameshow host. He's the twist villain who is pulling the strings. Except it's actually his assistant, Prima. She's the real twist villain.

Throughout being pulled and crammed through all of these situations, there's barely a sense of friendship forming between you and your party members. This isn't an RPG where you get a character sidequest with your three co-workers that gives you some insight into them. They just exist alongside you. When the game killed them after revealing the second twist villain, I didn't feel much of anything. It was surprising, I suppose, but I knew they wouldn't commit to it. They didn't.

(Edit: There are apparently secret scenes that you get through means that are not intuitive to me and involve friendship variables. I saw the scene with Echo on YouTube. It was cute. It probably would've helped me feel a bit more for the characters. I wish they weren't so obscured.)

The point I'm getting at here is that none of this means anything. Nothing is ever developed to a satisfying conclusion. The final conclusion to the game is going back in time before the game began in order to rectify you killing the guy at the beginning and killing the Anomaly, the Tiny Baby, before it can do anything (also, the boss at Gorilla Burger had an arrangement with the gangster to kill employees and turn them into food beforehand. So it's not like the "world's first knuckle sandwich" was actually the world's first. He's been doing this the whole time to feed those rainbow colored NPCs. They're mutants, by the way. That was an okay twist that didn't amount to much).

Busdriver (the guy who occasionally pops in and goes "wow that's crazy anyways im working on goblins right now and spirit cells) helps you out at the very end and apologizes to you for ruining your life and dragging you through all of this. You're finally given the choice to either forgive him or not to forgive him, and then you can choose whether to stay in Bright City or work as his partner.

None of this means anything.

Your lack of agency in the plot is felt throughout the game in ways I would consider unintentional, and it is never directly addressed until the last minute of the game. I desperately wanted a moment where the protagonist acknowledged the ridiculousness of the plot and being shunted from place to place without any rhyme or reason. Even a brief moment of rebellion would've made it clear what a nightmare the experience was and would've given it more weight. The protagonist never did.

If the game was about overconsumption and capitalism, it failed at that, too. There was a brief flicker of hope when Prima, the second twist villain, casually asked for backup after the Anomaly escapes, and your party member asks "who's responsible for this," which she's been trying to figure out the entire game. Prima, at first, addresses the fact that there is no "one person" responsible for this. You think for a moment that she's pointing out that there is no "final boss of capitalism." It's a system. That might've saved it for me. But no. Prima is responsible for this. It's just her. She's the CEO of Capitalism, actually.

I'm still thinking about the hook.

Maybe it's actually fair to criticize the game for that hook. It had gold on a platter, showed it to me, then tossed it out in favor of semi-coherent surreal shenanigans. It's less of a "criticizing the game for what it isn't." That's more akin to watching a horror film and complaining it isn't funny enough. The film is about horror. Unless it makes itself known as a horror comedy, you can't really get mad that it isn't funny.

But attempting to be funny and failing in a horror movie would be perfectly reasonable grounds for criticizing it for that, in the same way introducing horror into a comedic game can be done poorly. If the horror is barely developed, either failing to be integrated into the game's comedy or failing to transform into its own, terrifying monster, then it fails.

You shouldn't have introduced it to begin with.

well

im gonna lie down. this was miserable. it's hard to convey how sullen this whole experience has made me.

sorry, andrew brophy

maybe next time