Knytt Underground

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.