My next game that failed in making me scared is the mysterious Knock-Knock from Ice Pick Lodge. Another game that went for an unusual situation, unfortunately this was a case of a game being too unusual.
Knock-Knock:
Knock-Knock had you trying to survive in a cabin that would change its shape every night. As long as the lights were on you were safe but when the power goes out, strange things start to appear in the house. You have to avoid them while keeping as many lights on as possible and waiting until the morning comes to survive. Getting touched by one of the creatures will push the clock backwards and too many times will force you to restart the game.
Like Outlast, Knock-Knock had a great visual aesthetic, looking like an old children’s storybook and a demented main character. Having the levels be random each time you played was a great touch along with random sound effects designed to freak you out. Obviously this was the perfect game to play late at night with no one around.
The threats of the game followed their own rules which the player had to figure out on their own.
The biggest draw of Knock-Knock was the mystery of the game and how things worked — outside of a one screen description of the game; there were no real tutorials or explanations about how the game is supposed to work. Your only clue came from the ramblings of the lodger.
As I’ve talked about before, good horror design is about the unknown and once you try to explain things the situation loses its mystique which is not a problem that Knock-Knock had. Unfortunately there is a fine line between leaving things mysterious and just plain confusing which Knock-Knock became.
Stumbling in the Dark:
The big problem with Knock-Knock for me was that I was left more confused as to what to do than I was being scared. Without any explanation of the rules, I had no idea what I was doing wrong or how to improve and just got stuck three levels in. Finally any sense of horror was replaced by annoyance and I just shelved the game.
The game’s aesthetics were very well done and the use of randomized level design was a smart move.
This is the great balancing act of good horror games that we talked about on the recent podcast — A good horror game has to be built from the ground up as horror and be unique.
However if you make something too unique and different, you run the chance of making a game that’s too confusing for players to figure out.
And Ice Pick Lodge’s M.O of leaving as much up to the player to discover makes it hard to learn their games, a problem seen in their previous title The Void. In the end, Knock-Knock was a very polarizing game and I know some people who just loved it. But for me, this was a case where a developer thought too outside the box.
Up next we move from the indie market to the AAA and an attempt at reviving the horror genre.
