Review: Knuckle Sandwich

It’s kind of amazing how much influence Mother 3 has had on game design in the West, despite never being released here. It’s a bit hard to describe the difference between Earthbound influence and Mother 3 influence, but it’s there. Knuckle Sandwich seems to be in the Mother 3 camp.

Actually, Knuckle Sandwich is a bit of a mash-up of Mother 3, Undertale (which was also inspired by Mother 3), and WarioWare. At times, it seems to push the concept to the extremes. Other times, it wallows in it.

Knuckle Sandwich is mixed. How much you enjoy it is going to depend on your tolerance for its pacing, and if its weirdness and humor are enough for you to overlook some glaring flaws.

Knuckle Sandwich (PC)
Developer: Andy Brophy
Publisher: Superhot Presents
Released: November 22, 2023
MSRP: $19.99

You’re a hapless loser. You can’t hold down a job, you screw up everything you do, and people just keep taking advantage of your naivety.

Sorry, I’m talking about the protagonist of Knuckle Sandwich. I’m sure you’re lovely.

After moving to Bright City, the protagonist sets out to find a job and winds up with no end of bad luck. One thing leads to another, and a blue-skinned vampire is asking you to help figure out what keeps causing corruption in the city. Then it generally meanders about pointlessly.

Let me tell you, Knuckle Sandwich has one hell of an opening. For the first hour or so, you’re kicked around through a varied bunch of events, each one more subversive than the last. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but for a while there, I was thinking that this could be a late contender for some sort of Game of the Year award. I would say I was “grinning the whole way through” if I was still capable of feeling any sort of joy.

You might say that it kept going off script or, rather, that it never had a script at all. And then eventually, it finds its script, and everything comes screeching to a sudden halt.

While the early moments of Knuckle Sandwich might give you the impression that this is a parody RPG, it’s a bit misleading. This is just an RPG. Well, it’s not just an RPG, but it’s sunk so deeply in the genre that it’s more an RPG than it is anything else. You spend a lot of time in dungeons, solving simple puzzles and lining up to take turns swatting at enemies.

The big difference here is that each time you attack or defend, there’s a simple mini-game to decide how much damage you deal or receive. If you can nail a defense mini-game, it will cause damage to the enemy instead. There’s a vast assortment of mini-games, which is one of Knuckle Sandwich’s strengths. It doesn’t just rely on the abstract comparison of dice rolls and stat points; it provides something unique each time.

In many ways, this is yanked from Undertale but without the nuance of being presented as an alternative to combat. There is no alternative to combat. There’s just combat. Undertale gives you the choice of murdering people the old-fashioned way or playing a mini-game to avoid conflict, but Knuckle Sandwich just asks you to kill people. Which is fine, though it once again feels like a harsh contrast to the introduction.

The problem is that the mini-games quickly become tedious, and the combat is over-long. There isn’t a whole lot you can do to boost your advantage. Levels feel unmeaningful. Your inventory is laughably small (similar to Earthbound), so carrying healing items or extra weapons feels useless. You’re often left chipping away at enemy after enemy, and it begins to drag, and it never stops.

In the options, there’s a way to tweak the difficulty of the battles. After a while, I reduced the difficulty. Then, I enabled the option to skip them entirely. I really don’t regret that.

The narrative is in a similar place. In the beginning, it feels like the story is going to center around your hapless avatar. It feels like he’s there for us to laugh at as he gets kicked around, like Arthur Dent from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or the eponymous protagonist from The Stanley Parable. Early events put the hooks in, creating a fun mystery. Then, the whole story loses its center and meanders for the next ten hours.

Don’t get me wrong, the writing is often clever. The dialogue remains funny throughout the game, landing hits far more than misses. There are a lot of clever subversive tricks that it plays, and it often keeps you guessing.

It’s just when you remove the joke-filled dialogue and the breaks in the fourth wall, the overall plot is so limp and passionless. At its base level, it’s extremely simplistic and unfocused. Its conclusion is extremely unsatisfying, gathering up all the loose ends and trying to tie them together in a way that should be as clever as its prologue but instead feels lifeless. Some sub-plots feel as though they were forgotten entirely, whereas others get closure in a way that feels sloppy and rushed.

The protagonist goes from some schmuck who’s getting towed along against his will to some generic hero; a mostly incompetent last/best hope. Somewhere in that complete void of a personality, I guess there’s some buried self-righteousness that drives him onward. I feel short-changed and betrayed.

That’s an enormous shame. It’s not as though Knuckle Sandwich feels like a slapdash production. The art style and animations are extremely detailed, charming, and well-executed. This is supported by a weird but enjoyable soundtrack that compliments its aesthetic. If anything, it never quite lands on its own personality, but I’ll probably remember it best for its looks and sounds.

Overall, Knuckle Sandwich’s gameplay and narrative just aren’t as clever as its dialogue. It commits a parody game design faux pas very late in the game. This might be a spoiler, but it stops you to solve an “unavoidable series of convoluted puzzles,” and then it gives a near-literal wink. It’s a jab at RPG dungeon design. But then it makes you do those convoluted puzzles anyway. It makes you do something that it acknowledges as boring. And it is.

Good one.

Knuckle Sandwich is at its best when it goes off-script. It’s just that when it finally has to go back on-script, we find that the script is a rather tedious one. I spent 15 hours to see the ending in hopes that all the boredom I experienced was building to some sort of pay-off. That there would be some tremendous punchline at the end that brings reason to all my suffering. There was none. Just a fading bruise.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}