--- meaningless [C]ode ---

When I struggle to understand my reaction to any story, I ask myself, “Where is the love?”

NieR: Automata got me for the longest time because it seemed like a story about love. The set-up is a no-brainer: a pair of war buddy androids learn to open up to each other during their deployment. Because they are androids, it feels natural for them to question, often out loud and to the camera, their potential for emotions, evolution, and finding life paths outside the conventions of their manufacture. All in service of literally saving humanity.

Watching too-cool-for-emotions bombshell 2B play off socially starved twinklord 9S started out cute! The premise was endearing! 2B has such a cool design, I wanted to love her. (I wanted her in Smash Bros. just so I could see that dress in bright blue, tbh.)

But even in their story’s best moments, something felt off.

Because their robot bodies meant they could die in each other’s arms a billion times. They could lose their memories of each other and suffer inhuman anguishes. They could get corrupted by mind-controlling computer viruses and kill each other again and again. At some point, their cute banter, their requests for cute nicknames - it didn’t justify or counterweight the dramatic visuals of maimed bodies, crying faces, bleeding out, dying cold and feeling alone.

NieR: Automata is not a game about love. Whoever creates its stories only understands “love” as a pretext for suffering. Which is fucking tragic. Because it meant instead of mining the setting for the depth it inspired me to imagine, this game was much more fascinated with how it could shove absurd misery in my face like a moral-less episode of the Twilight Zone.

With this lens in mind, it was kind of pathetic how easily I could predict every “twist” in the game. Not in a lore accurate explanation sense - god no. I vaguely know the series’ plot template at this point, but none of it matters. Because in this game, everyone dies and is miserable, the end. Does an NPC have a friend? A lover? An endearing character trait? Then someone dies. Just everyone. All the time. Every time.

This is the game people meme’d Elden Ring to be.

In retrospect, none of this really surprises me, either? Nier: Automata is a puree of every writing sin I’ve written about for previous DrakeNier entries.

Drakengard - Pointless pontifications on violence in a game that doesn’t allow you to engage with itself any other way.

NieR - obsessed with the idea of “what is a person?” while drowning in the shallowest possible puddles.

Drakengard 3 - obsessed with “twists” at the expense of anything else, confusing curiosity for investment.

NieR Re-in-carnation - episodic misery porn

So you want to know what is unique about NieR: Automata? What special flavor gives it its own special repugnant aftertaste?

The “twist” that 9S is an incel - and secretly the main character. Every reveal of every other character’s secret backstory or motivation reinforced that 9S was the specialist boy. Everything that happened to every other character in the story happened for his “development”, and what he developed into was repulsive Hot Anime Nonsense disguised as an art house film. He. Sucks. His character has nothing to say. Nothing that drives him besides wanting to fuck 2B. A thing the game explicitly tells me when someone hacked his brain. 9S is a ball of impotent malice disguised as a tumblr soft-boy that lives for satisfying an unchecked id of violence and objectifying desire.

To anyone who wants to argue that means anything in the context of the premise, plot, or execution of NieR: Automata: gross. I am uninterested. I am not denying the possibility. I just don’t care.


--- just getting [S]tarted ---


Because here is where I do my DrakeNier style “gotcha!” moment and reveal that I actually don’t care about the story of Nier: Automata at all, and that my previous points were all merely pretense and introduction for talking about my real feelings for the game - how it is the slickest character action game I have ever played; derogatory.

For how much I “hate” the story of Nier: Automata, its three main routes sure went down smoothly. None of what I complained about above really congealed as a thought while I was playing. My brain didn’t catch up with what I had been consuming until the final act went off the deep end - I could feel during the finale my attention slowly lumbering back to ask “wait, really? That’s what we’re doing here?” Now that I’ve written even vague strokes about the plot, I can feel my memories of this story leaving my brain forever to better match the nothing of an emotional experience I had with it all.

Which I find very interesting! Because I ripped into every other entry in this series based on their stories more than anything else!

You know what NieR: Automata’s legacy in my life is and will be? Battling a single optional side quest boss named Father Servo. I was maybe level 30 at most. He was level 60. My damage output was miniscule, but non-zero. So I fought him. Between my auto-heal and vampirism skills, I could dance around enough to passively heal every time that I slipped up and took a hit, (which would knock out like ⅔ of my health).

This took over an hour. And then when I finally bested him, he got up with a SECOND HEALTH BAR. And I had to repeat the EXACT SAME FIGHT AGAIN. No new moves, no new gimmicks. Sunk-cost fallacy is a bitch, so I listened to this song for like two and a half hours, except you need to overlay gatling gun noises rattling in your skull the whole time for the full experience.

Now this song plays in my head when I’m doing something mindless and monotonous that somehow still feels necessary. Toweling off after a shower. Looking at my shopping list in a grocery store. I finished this fight weeks ago and it’s still happening! It’s so ridiculous and dumb that I’m equal parts endeared and exasperated.

So why did I talk about the plot of this game for a couple pages first? Because I needed to establish the profundity of what I didn’t think about while I was playing this game. Like the fact that I didn’t blink seeing an optional boss that was twice my level. The thought “maybe I should do this later” didn’t cross my mind. And, it was possible! The game let me do it! It sucked, but it wasn’t “hard”... just tedious.

Isn’t that weird??? Like, shouldn’t I have been scared off? Later, when I was level 60, I was killing dudes so fast that they barely had time to blink. Was that Father Servo fight supposed to be a joke I ruined by rushing to the punchline? When was I supposed to fight that guy??

Right before I would have unlocked fast-travel in this game, I unwittingly did every side-quest there was for me to do. Including the entirety of the Father Servo questline. Because this game kept crashing on my PS5 if I went near this one spot on the map that was necessary for advancing the plot. But I only thought to google my problem after I ran out of other things to do. I probably could have saved myself a couple hours of running alone by advancing the main plot just that one extra bit. So why was I content to run back and forth across the same map so many times, getting bobbles and trinkets and gold that I never used or looked at?

Because this game is slick.


--- an [O]asis of oil ---


Having played NieR, I was at first confused why people liked NieR: Automata so much better. Because structurally, it is the same. A barren “open world” made of a hub and spokes. The same respawning enemy placements. “Side quests” that are only ever visiting the same NPCs in the same locations and running between them. (NieR’s stories were far more interesting, and its enemy variety much more regional and profound!)

But what NieR: Automata has that NieR lacked was a satisfying run animation. Watching 2B’s thigh-high boots flash in the light while her short skirt swishes back and forth is fun to watch. Her gothic lace and katanas are inherently funny when she’s running up sand dunes or splashing through sewers.

More importantly, NieR: Automata has masterful conservation of momentum for other actions from a run. You jump farther with a running start. NieR: Automata has three different animations for mounting ladders depending on your movement speed: from a stand still, from a walk, or from a run. You can jump up the ladders. You have different animations for dismounting the top of a ladder depending on whether you were jumping and at what part of the jump animation you transitioned to a dismount animation. You have a different dismount animation if you jumped towards the top of the ladder part-way without climbing the top of it.

And all of these ladder clambering actions are smooth as hell. They’re effortless. How the characters in NieR: Automata vault over half-obstacles and bounce off walls show the first signs of all the stuff Square Enix lifted from this game when they made Kingdom Hearts III. 2B’s ladder descent animation is the kind of superb sexy fun that reminds you Bayonetta 2 just finished cooking down the hall. Running, vaulting, double jumping, hang-time glide falling - they all have a breathless weightlessness to them that makes environmental traversal thoughtless.

But the movement itself is only one part of three as to how this game feels so slick. Because the UI design is polished to a blinding sheen.

When you open the pause menu, the map is the first thing you see. Making the map take up the whole screen takes a single flick of the camera stick. Flicking the camera stick starts engaging the 3D map in some way, flipping or rotating it. I cannot overstate the genius of this. The actions of “map selection” and “map interaction” are merged. This means that even if the player is opening the map multiple times to check where they are and where they’re going, it minimizes the sensation that there’s a break in the action - they are still playing the game even as they’re reading and synthesizing information.

Both the main map and the mini-map have all available side-quests, including ones you haven’t started yet, indicated at all times. This means that if you take a wrong turn navigating the environment, if you’re close enough to something else of interest, the decision to change targets takes a short enough amount of time that it feels like it was always intentional.

Which will happen often, because the environment is filled with obstacles to jump over. You will miss jumps and end up on the wrong side of buildings. Because you will be running so fast and blindly all of the time, because why wouldn’t you be running all the time?

I normally develop a great mental map when playing video games, but I still got lost in Nier: Automata’s tiny hub world map through to the end of my playtime. Because the penalty for taking a wrong turn didn’t register as annoying enough for me to learn. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop the wrong way was as engaging as doing anything else. And then I got fast travel anyway, which eliminated the need further. I routinely got my fast travel points mixed up, too. And that also didn’t matter. Because zooming around was engaging and mindless.

Was it fun? I dunno. Maybe for a couple moments in the hours I ran around. But running felt better than waiting through the loading times of fast travel. It’s not like I was fighting anything during my zooming, anyway.

Which is where I get to the third pillar of this game’s slickness - the combat. And I want to linger on the confluence of slicknesses that stopped me from learning the map, and how that applies to combat.

Because the menu stays accessible during combat. You can chug potions at any time. You can change weapon load-outs and equipped skills at any time. And like, yeah, that feels awesome! Why wouldn’t I want to be able to access everything in the menus whenever I wanted? That feels so player-empowered!

But you know what else that stopped me from doing? Fucking dodging. Why would I bother paying attention to enemy attack patterns and my own movement if I could just drink health potions from a pause menu if it ever got dire? Each time I died in the early game was a genuine surprise, because my brain forgot that combat meant I was in danger.

So after something killed me a couple times and I figured I should rummage through the skill menu for the first time, I found I had an… auto-heal ability? If I could avoid taking damage for 6 seconds, then 2B would start getting health back for free. Awesome! Look at all the health potions I could save! (For context, a health potion costs like a dime. So this impulse to “save” on health potions is incredibly stupid.)

But now I had an incentive to not get hit. I started dodging all the time. And you know, that dodge animation is so slick. 2B glows in a highly abstracted way, time slows down, particle effects everywhere - in the drab world of NieR: Automata, dodging feels like the most importantly animated thing in the whole game. You can dodge out of most attack animations! You can dodge consecutively with very little consequence! And if you dodge at the right time, you can unleash a near-invincible counter-attack!

Now you might be thinking, “but you can’t beat a character action game just by dodging all the time,” and you would be correct. But NieR: Automata has something else in its combat to make you feel like you’re winning all the time, even when you objectively suck and are missing all your punches. A little flying robot companion who has an infinite ammo gatling gun. As long as you’re willing to hold down the fire button, he will shoot at anything you’re targeting. Is the damage a ton? Not to start. But non-zero damage is indeed damage. You can start shooting dudes before they’re in range of your sword! You can shoot flying enemies without having to jump up there!

Maybe astute readers can see how this came together to culminate in my Father Servo experience. That’s right, a good majority of the damage I did to him in that fight was from holding down the fire button on my robo buddy while running around trying not to get hit. Did I try to hit him with my sword? Of course I did! I had another skill where I got health back from dealing damage to enemies. But after so many dozens of minutes and so many close calls, it wasn’t worth it to try to do more than one or two swipes at a time and risk having to do the fight again later. Besides, I could just barely see his health bar going down, if I just held out a bit longer…!


--- all in the name of [L]ove ---


I want to stress that every individual design decision in NieR: Automata feels incredibly kind. Rarely have I felt so visibly cared for.

NieR: Automata has multiple sections where the camera zooms out and locks the player character into a 2D plane. Running up curved staircases, crossing long bridges, certain hub world areas - it makes a ton of sense! Navigating those kinds of environments is annoying in 3D with full character and camera control! By turning those same hallways into 2D spaces, you get some visual variety - seeing your character from a new angle, the camera now allowed to change its focus to capture a larger part of the environment. It’s such an elegant gesture that provides multiple boons at once.

I had multiple real-life friends talk this game up when they heard I was playing it. They loved it. Mind, these are the kind of people who play maybe half of one game a quarter on a busy gaming year. One of them even platinum’d the game. But when I asked them why NieR: Automata was “so good, dude”, everyone seemed to draw a blank. “Just play it man, you’ll see.”

Well I did.

I saw a game with really drab colors. Where the environments were rendered with enough loving detail to trick people into thinking it had an art direction. (Seriously, the androids, the robots, the realistic backgrounds, the surrealist liminal spaces - nothing goes together! Not even the player characters' combinations of gothic velvet, Japanese weaponry, and chibi robo companions make any visual sense!)

I saw a game with an incomprehensible story that seemed as unfocused and inconsequential as it did mean, nihilistic, and dumb.

I saw a game with lovingly flashy combat animations that made me think people really want to play Kingdom Hearts but with a “mature” aesthetic. Enough of a veneer that they’re playing a Real Game™ while being asked to do as little as possible to progress.

So hear me out.

Conceptually, NieR: Automata is not in the same wheelhouse as Bayonetta - it is a Kirby game.

Kirby Super Star has so much effort put into its 20 or so movesets. Each one is bursting with delightful animations and sparkles and sound effects that, in the SNES era, were straight damn opulent. Controlling Kirby is extremely satisfying, because all of his movements are fast and slick. By which I mean, the time between pressing a button and something loud and flashy and useful happening is measured in a miniscule amount of frames.

Yet all these crazy abilities can only be used on cutesy puffs of candy people whose concept of combat is, at best, the notion that maybe they should walk towards their adversary. They are moving targets, excuses to unleash all the fun and flashy spritework Kirby has at his disposal.

And you know what? You can just fly over all of it. Ignore it all.

You know how I usually die in Kirby Super Star? When I try to look really cool and style on a brainless enemy in such a way that I fall down a pit.

You know what the penalty is for doing so? Usually nothing, it’s a Kirby game lmao.

So let’s look at NieR: Automata.

2B can equip two weapons at a time, one for light attacks, one for heavy attacks. She can switch between load-outs of weapons mid-combat. Each combination of weapon types have different combos for attacking between the light and heavy attack buttons. You can upgrade weapons to extend their movesets. The world of NieR: Automata comes to life when you swing your sword, every stroke blazing with golden lights and particle effects.

2B can be equipped with myriad skills. Her aforementioned helper buddies have gatling guns, missiles, laser blasts, and use magic spells. All of these can be upgraded and customized. Not to mention that 9S fights alongside you, and you can tell him to specialize in one of many combat styles.

Yet all these crazy abilities can only be used on cutesy gumball head robots whose concept of combat is, at best, flailing their arms in the direction of their adversary. They are moving targets, excuses to unleash all the fun and flashy particle effects 2B has at her disposal.

And you know what? You can just run past all of it. Ignore it all.

You know how I died in NieR: Automata, when I could still die? When I was trying to look cool and style on brainless enemies with new weapons in such a way I forgot to heal.

You know what the penalty was for doing so? Running back to where I was. It’s a Kirby game.

Seriously, there’s no depth, no enemy or boss fight that made me unlearn my basic habits of “shoot gatling gun, run towards enemy, press light attack button until dead.” When my brain switched off, sometimes I’d forget to press an attack button, and just walk around picking up trinkets while my gatling gun sidekick friend killed everything for me. Which somehow was a viable strategy! There were some boss fights in the final act that started dying mid-diatribe from my auto-attack alone before I had time to find and walk towards them! And I never upgraded it once!

And that’s what’s at the heart of a Kirby game. They’re unbalanced in favor of the player in such a way that they are banking on the player button-mashing enough to not notice. You don’t need to get good at them. In fact, digging into whatever flashy abilities are most fun for you might make the game take longer than if you stuck to defaults.

All the proof I had of the uselessness of the combat in NieR: Automata came when 9S, instead of a strong attack, had the ability to “hack” enemies. That is, to play a twin-stick shooter mini-game. This mini-game lasts between 2 and 15 seconds. It deals colossal damage. If it weren’t for the visually necessary screen transitions between combat and hacking minigame, it would be a no-brainer to be doing this all the time from a pure damage-per-second perspective.

But I rarely did this on purpose outside of mini-bosses because I wanted the satisfaction of hitting the light attack button and punching dudes. Even if my auto-attack robo-buddy was killing things just as fast as I was anyway. I at least wanted the pretense of involvement to be maintained.

And for some people, that is enough. NieR: Automata loves those people, and they feel loved by it. You can tinker with your build like a mechanic, forget everything in the couple weeks before you play the game again, and still feel like you’ve retained all your skills as a gamer as you mow down dudes.

The story is shocking, but is so cheap that you don’t have to remember anything that happened before. Just follow the quest marker, bro. The spectacle of the moment is all that matters. Sure there is lore and terms swirling around you, but if you can understand the moment-to-moment surprise and drama, then maybe it feels like you’ve been paying better attention than you thought.

And playing the game is frictionless. It never gets frustrating. It always feels like it has thought of you, and what you most want to do in this exact moment, and make it as smooth as possible.

It loves you.

Right?


--- no ghost, all [M]achine ---


NieR: Automata is flawless in a way that does not make it perfect. I struggle to say it’s even good, because the totality of my experience can be summed up as engaging without being fun. But it’s so engaging that even now I’m unsure if I’m correctly remembering the difference.

2B is very clearly the daughter of NieR and Bayonetta. She inherited all their “best” features. But where is her soul?

Combat in NieR was slow and stiff, both for Nier and the monsters he fought. It was as if underwater. But the enemies behaved in ways that forced you to think about them differently. Some danced around to your back. Some had armor that needed to be broken. Some shot volleys of beams that needed to be dispersed or evaded. Even if you changed the difficulty to Easy, you still needed to be aware of your surroundings, mindful of the timing of your button presses.

Bayonetta is built around dodging at the last second, but with intentionality. Whiff a dodge, and you need to wait a beat to try again. Maybe if I’d put in more time to be more skilled, I’d know Bayonetta has the best combat system of all time, but between how enemies act and the elaborateness of the combos you need to combat them, engaging with combat in Bayonetta is a full brain experience. And it is fun. Because Bayonetta is fun, and styling as Bayonetta looks fun, and styling as Bayonetta makes you feel like a 4D chess grandmaster.

In both of those games, you will die. You will get hurt. And you will learn. With the learning comes fulfillment, with the knowledge comes mastery, with the mastery comes fun. They are different types, and Bayonetta’s is much easier to explain the appeal of than NieR’s, but there is fun to be had there.

NieR: Automata is too kind to let me get hurt. So concerned with giving me options to feel powerful to ever let me feel weak.

Fundamentally, NieR: Automata’s problems cannot be solved by “turning up the difficulty, bro”. I killed Father Servo with a 30+ level deficit! How would cranking up the difficulty have changed that experience? Made it take four hours instead of two? For as much as I called Nier: Automata a Kirby game, even the last Kirby game I played ended with Baby’s First Bloodborne Boss, (which was wild to watch my 9-year-old-nephew absolutely smoke). The secret final boss of NieR: Automata is nothing that can’t be taken down with the tried and true strategy of “shoot gatling gun, run towards enemy, press light attack button until dead” - except maybe with the spice of chugging more potions than normal.

I see the potential for this to be the best game of all time. The set-up has such immaculate ludo-narrative harmony. For as much as the visuals clash, they make readability for gameplay impeccable. You had the backing of a publisher who would let storytellers get absolutely crazy with their biggest IPs working with a studio that had proven they could make a damn fine combat system.

But this? What actually exists? I dunno what to tell you, man.

This game is like eating at McDonalds in the heart of Tuscany.



--- secret [E]nding ---


Hey, you know why I played this whole DrakeNier franchise?

Because I had a crush on someone who said this was their favorite game of all time.

And I wanted to talk to them about it.

So I played the whole franchise.

The end.

Is this what people are talking about when they've become too used to the refined controls and design of modern games and then go back to the prior versions of them? Cause I just got done with Odyssey and holey moley I do not like this. Just like everyone else, I don't like the camera, which often flat-out refuses to let you adjust to an easier angle for yourself, and also (a common trait among all the gamecube games it appears) makes it so pushing the analog left turns the camera right and vice versa without an option to invert. I don't like how everything, from jumping, aiming the nozzle, chasing after goopy Mario and then spraying him, accidentally sliding on goop or slopes that don't look like slopes, leaping high enough to get a nearby ledge, is a struggle. The Petey Pirhana fight in midair in the first world was not difficult per se, but was rather such a chore, so much work when Odyssey's boss fights were snappy and fun. I knew what I had to do but it took so long between Petey's behaviors and the way Mario controls, and I can't imagine how I would have gotten through it if Dolphin didn't have save states (also it figures too, because I recognize Petey in Mario Kart 8 and he's a fuckin asshole in that game too).

But you wanna know what I really don't like about this game? The voice acting. And not just that, but voice acting which thereby necessitates more, and frankly unnecessary, exposition to justify it. What's it doing here? Mario is still just Charles Martinet hoots and whoops, so what was enhanced by everyone else delivering real voice work to a "why Mario needs to jump on shit this time" story? Take a look at this. First you fight a token baddie and meet your latest sidekick/game mechanic, then you get sent to jail and the Delfino floofers put Mario on trial and make a long compelling case proving him guilty of the crime of polluting the city and sentence him to island arrest till the pollution is finally cleaned up, then in jail FLUDD explains that you were indeed found guilty of polluting the city, and goes into detail that without the precious shine tokens the good floofer people of Delfino can't possibly ever holy shit I don't fucking care. It's a Mario 3D platformer, not Inherit the Wind, wrap it up! And to make matters worse, goopy Mario tries to kidnap peach, spilling the distinct black goopy muck everywhere all the while, and Mario chases him around town, in full view of the floofers. It's now obvious to them that Mario didn't cause the pollution! So what are we doing here?! Look, games don't have to have compelling stories, sometimes there just has to be something there to make the gameplay happen. But if you're going to bother with a more developed story, it's on your ass to do it right!

Compare that to the setup for Odyssey: "Ah, goddamn, looks like bowser kidnapped peach, and also my hat sister! To go get him, we have to collect moons to power my ship and follow him around the world! Got it? Okay, let's go!" Five seconds flat. Now let's go have some fun, collecting souvenirs and outfits, and possessing enemies, and utilizing the very best moveset a Mario game has ever had, wahoo! Meanwhile, there's no fun to be had with your stiff, cold, milquetoast companion here. Man, I hate FLUDD. FLUDD is like if your dopey classmate in fifth grade who reminded the teacher they didn't assign homework yet was programmed into a water-spray robot you can't ever leave. Truly, Mario is in jail, serving a sentence, if he has to complete his adventure with this dweeb.

I played 64 long after the fact, as a grown up, and thought at the time that, despite how important it is in games history, it was awkward to control most of the time, and I didn't like its design of "see this world? now go back into it and do six more chores." I'm glad that back in 2002 Nintendo saw my notes and decided to make it even worse.

didn't expect there to be actual photographic evidence in this

the longer the columbine segment went, the less i cared. it's just wayyy too long and mind-numbing

the hell segment is a serious difficulty spike until you get the chaingun, there onward it's pretty easy too lol
the maze-like design is extremely annoying though

the auto-combat choices more often than not make no sense

funny midi music especially creep's vocals switching into the chorus

i suppose it makes sense to an extent this is juvenile seeing the pov it takes but idk like. points for "openly gay man" and "black man" being enemy types, accurate to eric's thoughts. this generally has interesting attention to detail but idk how much of the bullying narrative we're supposed to buy and how much is there because this is their pov

the random character island is only slightly amusing, moreso because it's very strange it's even in the same game as a recreation of the columbine massacre which includes real pictures of the dead shooters

idk this is weird! i don't wanna condemn it too harshly nor praise it per se it's very weird

btw why are there No youtube walkthroughs of this? i got stuck before the massacre because i didn't realize i had to go to a certain tile to trigger the cutscene and had to use a text guide that wasn't very helpful lol

I don't know how to review this game, and I don't think I can give it a rating. If I told you that slaughtering students gets repetitive, would you say it was a bad part of the game design or a good part of the game design?

I am not sure how to feel about this game. It was horrific following out the actions of the killers on that day. The entire game stings of sarcasm and black comedy, it was controversial when it was released and it still is controversial.

Was the part in hell necessary? Probably not right? I don't know.

I just don't know.

Let's talk about strategy guides. It's no secret some games have very obtuse elements about them. Often times, they're not meant to be used in a first playthrough at all and are the kind of thing one would find out from Nintendo Power ages later. One example would be the Hadouken and Shoryuken in the Mega Man X games. Then there are secrets like the Lightsaber in Ico which nobody would ever find without a strategy guide, but the player probably wants to get on their first playthrough even if they don't necessarily need it.

And then you have games that can feel completely overwhelming or even unplayable without a strategy guide. I cannot even begin to name all the point-and-clicks and JRPGs filled to the brim with labyrinthine structures, permanently missable content, bugs or intended conditions that cause the player's save file to essentially become bricked, sidequests so hidden it took decades to find them, etc etc etc.

Knytt manages to be all of this. Knytt is nearly a brilliant game. When I started playing Knytt, I picked up all but 3 items blind in under an hour. At first, I thought it was a very soothing experience with an incredible atmosphere. The ambient music is shockingly amazing, and perfectly compliments the dark yet colourful world.

Unfortunately, as I neared the end of the game, I started growing increasingly frustrated. Too many platforms were lined up in such a way the player was only 1 pixel out of reach to entering a new path. It became hard to distinguish background characters from actual enemies. And then the worst part happened; I accidentally jumped into an invisible tile in the middle of nowhere that turned out to be an important warp zone.

Within minutes, my opinion of the game lowered from perhaps a 9/10 to a 7/10 at best. I'm not even certain if the last few powerups can be found without all the other warp zones I discovered in a speedrunning video, because there are no guides online. There is no communication to the player they are near an invisible tile, and the game's world is so massive it takes about 5 minutes to run across it in a straightish line. I did find some codes for the game on GameFAQs but I don't think the game itself communicates them anywhere either https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/937276-knytt/cheats

So what are we left with? A passionate and unique game that is ultimately too messy and unnecessarily obtuse for its own good. What could have been an all time classic PC metroidvania is bogged down by adhering to the "we need to sell strategy guides" school of thought despite it being a freeware indie game.

If the game looks up your alley, my suggestion is to look for how ever many items you can naturally find in about an hour with the searchlight feature, and then watch this speedrun to find the rest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmg_maTOSrs

Also worth noting, it is a 2006 PC game. It ran without any significant issues on my Windows 11 rig, but I did have to use Joy2Key for controller support and the fullscreen was a bit fucked in that it forced everything to my second monitor. It's nothing too inconvenient given how short the game is however.