plooshkin: [Gpost] Knock-knock and the reality fragments

This is your brain on Knock-knock

If you were to say to a seasoned gamer: "Oh, it's an Ice Pick Lodge game.", that would be all the description they needed. For those of us with far less XP, I will translate what I believe this means: This game will mess with your head in subtle and creepy ways.

Knock-knock is supposed to be a horror game. I say "supposed to be" because it isn't outright scary. It's subtle, it is what "Zodiac" is to horror movies. You won't scream and jump out of your seat as you might with "Amnesia". You may not even realize it's creeped into your head and set up residence in that part of your brain that would still check for monsters under your bed.

You play the Lodger, a wild-eyed self-proclaimed scientist (world-ologist, by his words), observer of nature. His slippers, night shirt and shawl make him look clumsy. His voice is a murmur of a claymation character. You never quite know if he is an insomniac, insane or just unlucky. He mutters to himself (and you) about what happens in the house. He draws you in with his peculiar ritual of checking all the lights in the house: his real house and the dream house.Your mission is to survive until morning. Sounds easy enough. It isn't.

But don't take my word for it. I asked my S.O. to write down his experience with the game, being an experienced gamer and all. So, for the first time, I'm having a guest post! Yay!

Knock-knock is a game I know by reputation. It's by Ice-Pick Lodge, a highly reputable band of lunatics. And that reputation was enough to make me reluctant to play it, because I don't deal well with the dark, or the things your imagination might put into that dark.
Knock-knock is a game about a lunatic. He reveals it immediately, as he rambles to himself about having to check the doors, walking strangely through a deserted house where the furniture fades in gradually as you stay in a room. Sometimes pop-up messages appear with his diary notes. Sometimes you go out of the house and wander through a dark forest where a little girl shows you fragments of reality.
It's eerie. Unsettling. Freaky. At the start, I was nervous what would happen. But nothing happened, so I kept playing. The house became comfortable, the weird shifting of rooms and appearance of furniture becoming routine. There was nothing to fear.

Due to some weird glitch, my Guests have no heads...

And then the guests arrive.

The guests are strange nightmarish creatures lurking just off the edge of your vision, off the edge of the screen. If they touch you, something happens. What is it? I don't know. Things shift, weirdness appears at the edge of the screen. Just when you've got used to the house, the guests throw you off again. You don't know what touching them does to you, but it feels wrong. So you run.

It's implied that turning on the lights keeps the guests under control. Does it actually? I don't know, but I stumbled through the rooms, turning those lights on. The protagonist mutters about hide-and-seek, so I hid behind furniture, and sometimes the guests went away. There are rules, but it's hard to figure out what they are. And then the big eye appears, staring at you as you try to turn on a light. If you keep going with the light, the eye hurts you. If you don't, you can sort of step through the eye, finding yourself in an endless hallway.

What does it all mean? I don't know. There's a lot of things I didn't know about this game, because it never tells you anything, but you guess at the rules from what happens. Eventually you just want to make it through each night, watching gleefully as a progress screen advances and whimpering as (what you assume is) the health bar goes down every time you touch a guest. You run panickingly through the rooms, trying to avoid the guests as your health bar dips, shrieking as one appears just out of nowhere. And sometimes there are other things, freakish dopplegangers and little babysitters weeping in corners. Can they hurt you? You don't know, so you try, and then you still don't know.

Eventually the game ends as you finish that progress bar. An ending appears. You have no idea what it means, and you're not sure if you won or lost, but it feels satisfying. That's Knock-knock for ya. You have no idea what it's happening, but it feels like you're making progress, and it's so very satisfying.

I loved the art style of this game. It reminded me of old Russian cartoons I watched as a kid. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Ice Pick Lodge is Russian! The game contains some beautiful surrealistic artwork, named "fragments of reality", which you can obtain by facing a small spectral girl or wandering the infinite corridors, which the breaches in the reality fabric lead to. I replayed the game, just so I could collect all of them (the fact that there is a Steam achievement for it has nothing to do with it).