Knight Lore

Knight Lore is another ambitious game. This time your explorer navigates an isometric maze trying to find 14 ingredients for a potion to cure his werewolf curse. There are plenty of objects, many more than the two of each that you need, but finding them and getting to them is the problem. When you find the cauldron, you can stand on top of it to see a visualisation of what is needed, then drop the correct item in, then see the next one. If you have managed to drop items nearby, you can repeat the pattern quickly.

The game utilises a day/night cycle which automatically transforms you into a werewolf during the night and back again during the day. The time passes pretty fast, and so it becomes quite annoying. I didn't notice much difference in gameplay other than in werewolf form, some enemies will charge you, and the cauldron attacks you with a magic blast. The transformation is another source of danger since it takes a few seconds and leaves you open to be killed by an enemy. There is a time limit of 40 nights.

In each room, there is often a platforming/navigation challenge with the reward being one of the ingredients. Many of these rooms are at least interesting; given the limited graphics and physics, they do a good job of moving platforms, opening gates, falling platforms, pushable blocks/tables, and varied sprites.

The bad part of that is the isometric viewpoint doesn't give you a good judgement of some of the placements meaning that you will attempt a jump only to find that you weren't at the correct position either horizontally or vertically. This is really frustrating but is alleviated by Rare Replay's rewind feature.

You can get extra height by placing one of your collected items down and standing on top of it. I'm not sure if it was intended, but if you jump and attempt to pick up the item, you can gain the height and pick the item back up at the same time. Just like in games like Atic Atac, you can only carry three items, so will need to drop them in a better location to recollect them.

You cannot attack in either form. There are a variety of dangers, but most dynamic dangers (ghosts, blobs, guards) seem to move randomly or in predictable patterns rather than actively pursuing you.

Since it is a large map, and rooms can take several seconds to navigate, then it's a long game. Given it is easy to lose a life due to touching a hazard; either an enemy or spike, then it's another game that is hard to understand how people completed this back in the day.

Visually a very interesting and advanced game, it requires you to wander around a castle with three-dimensional platform blocks in order to find 40 ingredients for a magician's potion. Enormous potential but sadly, all the game does with its mechanics is leave you scale platforms and doing time-precission jumping, oftenly using objects from your inventory as lift, but you repeat the same tedious process hundreds of times for it. It lacks elemental variety, the inventory items don't help you or give you power-ups, and all the enemies here are only there to be avoided, you can't actually fight them.

Similarly, the werewulf transformation is pointless. It does nothing in the game except trigger the magician's cauldron to attack you. If it had given you an attacking move that'd be swell, but like this it's like the werewulf mode doesn't even exist.

A promising game that had fantastic ideas, but wasn't bright enough to know what to do with them.