Knytt Underground

Knytt Stories is one of my favorite platformers of all time. The peaceful atmosphere, the simple, but tight controls, and the sense of exploration all combined into a wonderful, unique experience.

Knytt Underground builds on that, but unfortunately loses just about everything I liked about Knytt Stories. The largest difference between the two games is, well, the size. Knytt Underground is absolutely massive. The map is huge, and there are even pretty large areas outside the map, making it even bigger. There's a lot of content to explore here, and exploration is really the main component of the game. The main problem then, is that the exploration simply doesn't feel rewarding. There are several reasons for this.

The first reason is simple: in a game of thousands of rooms, discovering a new one just doesn't feel very special.

This is further amplified by the fact that the rooms really aren't special. Whereas in Knytt Stories the different areas had different tilesets and moods, this isn't the case in Knytt Underground. Every area of the game looks just about the same. It's black (cause, you know, it's underground). In Knytt Stories, encountering a new area that had its own distinct visual style felt rewarding. In the underground, that's gone.

It's true that games like Limbo manage to use a greyscale artstyle to great effect. However, there are two significant differences. First, Limbo isn't 20 hours long. Second, Limbo isn't tile-based. So whereas all objects in the game may be black, they still differ in shape. Not so much in Knytt Underground. The foreground looks the same all over. Plus, Limbo had tons of great animation which this game doesn't.

What makes the areas feel at least slightly different are the backgrounds, which do vary. Unfortunately, that just isn't enough to stave off the feeling of repetition.

But of course, Knytt Stories doesn't just reward you with different tilesets. It also gives you items that change up your movement and allow you to progress further. Using this, the world is initially blocked off, which means the player doesn't have to feel overwhelmed with possibilities of where to go, and when they do get an item that allows them to progress, it feels rewarding.

Knytt Underground also has items, but none of them affect movement. They are all fetch quest items. This means that after two short tutorial chapters, the world is completely open to explore. It is easy to feel overwhelmed and directionless.

The second major difference between the two games is the focus on story in Underground. The game now has dialogue! Although the main character, Mi, is mute, she has two fairies, Dora nad Cilia, that do her talking for her. Whereas Dora is religious and believes in the kindness of... mankind? sprocketkind?, Cilia is a far more cynical atheist. This difference in attitude and worldview makes up much of their conversation.

This is probably the best part of the game and I quite like how most quests and undertaken not for the promise of any reward (there usually isn't one) but for the sake of helping. There are also a few nice moments sprinkled throughout the game where you get to learn more about the characters. However, in a game that took me 20 hours to finish, the interactions I actually found enjoyable made up less than half an hour. The vast majority of the game is spent traversing the huge map and that's a part I simply didn't enjoy. For one because the exploration didn't feel rewarding, but also because I'm not a fan of the movement mechanics themselves.

The movement is a combination of Knytt Stories and Within a Deep Forest, and whereas I like the movement mechanics of Knytt Stories, I can't say the same for Within a Deep Forest, or practically any other physics-based game. They easily get frustrating.

I....don't really get it, I think?

I appreciate games being weird but Knytt Underground is weird in a way that's totally unrelated to any of the positives I'd think of surrounding that word - it's set in a pretty basic, normal world (one that's not very well described and fleshed out, truth be told), the gameplay, controls, and feel are pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a modern 2D platformer, and the characters don't have the instant visual charisma that those in...well, any other 2D game I've played recently (Limbo, Guacamelee!, and Trine 2, for the record). Even the puzzles are....well, they're just unremarkable puzzles, really. It's only weird in its set-up and execution, as it's split into three episodes, two of which are very short and linear and one of which is utterly fucking massive in comparison, suddenly encouraging exploration out of nowhere halfway through a game that was holding your hand up to that point. And the end result of this exploration is.....trophies. That's literally it. You get no bonus in-game, no power-ups, no extra lives, no stats increase, no anything, it's literally all about the little pop-up.

Now, I know a whole lot of people couldn't care less about them, but I love trophies - I feel that they add an extra sense of purpose and accomplishment to games, and are a nice, more complex way of signposting how much of a game you've experienced. And yeah, there are certainly plenty of times when I'll do something in-game then I wouldn't necessarily have done otherwise just to make a trophy pop. Knytt Underground takes the piss with it though - it's entirely possible to complete the game without picking up a single trophy, and conversely possible to pick up every trophy without completing it, which makes me feel like this game has trophies just for the sake of having trophies. And if *I* of all people feel that, something's wrong.

Okay, it doesn't really affect gameplay all that much, but it's a symptom of something larger at work here - it feels like Knytt Underground wasn't actually planned out at the pre-production stage, as though they just started making a game to see what would happen and never went back to clean things up. Frankly, it's all just a bit of a mess - the first and second chapters are just sort of 'there', not really capable of raising a reaction of any sort (they feel more like a tutorial than anything - but not necessarily a tutorial for this game, more the kind of tutorial you'd see in classroom teaching people how to make games), while the third suddenly dumps you into a different game that relies on you feeling the desire to explore a world that the game hasn't given you much of a reason to care about. And then your reward for exploring that world is....nothing, effectively. Sure, some of the hidden areas need some nifty platforming skills to reach, but it's hard not to get confused when you've been through these moments and find yourself at a dead end - surely you'd put something like that as part of the main game, right? It's not like they're outrageously hard. Instead they feel bolted on at the end when they realized the game was too basic and easy.

Maybe the ending's amazing, but truth be told I didn't really care enough about Knytt Underground to finish it, despite getting quite close. I was just confused by it, ultimately - I really don't know what this game was aiming for, and a nagging voice tells me that the developers didn't either.