No Review Games on Steam: Pixel Knight

I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game.  In that pursuit, I'm reviewing Steam games with no reviews to get an idea of why they failed.  Here is the transcript for Pixel Knight: 

Welcome to another Adventure Mechanics Side Quest. I'm Chandler. Today we're going to continue the zero review games series on Steam with Pixel Knight.  Pixel Knight was released in 2023 under Eross Video Games.  It's not their first game, either on Steam or on Itch. They have since released the beginning of another game on Itch a month after releasing Pixel Knight in 2023. So, we aren't talking about developers first game here.  Although the developer may be inexperienced, they have released several games before Pixel Knight. It does appear they have gone dormant after their last game in 2023, with no notable updates or new releases since then, however.

But let's talk about the game in question.  Pixel Knight is a platforming beat 'em up. In it, you will face platforming challenges on top of fighting various flavors of goomba style monsters. The artwork is very good, although it is missing a lot of transition frames, such as jumping and getting hit. I'm not particulalry surprised, since I was able to find the asset pack used for the skeleton enemy on Itch.io.  As such, I'm not going to comment further on the art, since it's likely composed almost entirely from asset packs.  The choice of packs do work well together, which is is a point to the designer.  I will, however, note that even when you purchase assets, unless the license forbids modification, change them to fit your game, like making jump animations for the main player. I talked about assets more in a previous side quest if you're interested in more of my thoughts on asset packs.

The musical choices in the game are surprisingly upbeat and definitely make the vibe of the game more engaging. I suspect that the music follows art, in that it's likely a "best fit" instead of music composed for the game directly.  Like art, that means I'll only be critiquing on how it fits the game.  Some of the pairings, such as the level select screen, don't really match the rest of the theming.  If the designer chose music more holistically and went for a specific style, then the audio scape may have been a bit better. 

There are a lot of additional mechanics in this game that you can engage with, or you can ignore. There is a dash, for example that I never touched while I was testing this game. It shows in the steam trailer, but I never ended up feeling like I had to use it. Overall, this game is a decent representation of an action platformer, but there are a lot of things missing and that is holding the game back.

Let's talk about movement. In an action platformer, you typically have a ramp up to max speed ramp down situation. It makes the game feel like it has weight. This game is all or nothing in terms of speed. And that doesn't feel great. Jumping has no pre or post jump animations, and this makes it feel stilted while jumping. There's no animation of the player in air, either up or down, which only adds to the stilted feel of the movement. I didn't notice jumping itself feeling particularly bad, per se, but it didn't feel great, either.  And may the jump gods have mercy on your soul if you want to attack in mid-air.  That WILL kill all horizontal momentum and send you to the briny depths. I know it sounds like I am harping on this game's movement, and I am, but it is competing with the likes of Shovel Knight, Hollow Knight, Abathor, to say nothing of pure platformers like any entry in the Super Mario series. And missing the most fundamental mechanic of the game is going to turn off players at the very start. If the developers spent more time working on how movement felt, I feel like this game would have reached a larger audience alone. Level design needs to be changed as well. 

For some reason, the designer has a fetish for blind jumps and jumps just at the edge of the players capability. I know that creates tension, but from level 1 to when I stopped playing, every jump felt like it was going to be my end. And, don't get me started on how the blind jumps we're not telegraphed very well. It even shows one in the steam trailer for this game. If you watch the video and that blind jump doesn't bother you, great, you might enjoy this game. But I don't know very many people that enjoy blind jumps. They weren't fun in platformers in the '90s and they're not fun now.

The one note jumps make all the levels feel absolutely basic. There is just enough detail in the background to not call it a test level. It's not much beyond that, though. If the designer wanted to continue working on this game, he needs to go back and think of the challenges that each level is going to have. The leaps of faith and blind jumps each level gets tiresome very quickly and there's not much beyond running from the left to the right with some borderline unfair jumping challenges in between. If certain levels were dedicated to more interesting challenges, or interactions with the enemies, then I feel like this game would have a lot more to it. I'll save most of my thoughts on the enemies for later, though.

The second part of the game is the combat. It is basic, but it has just enough feedback to the player that it is functional. It's not great, much like the movement was, but it is good enough. The player can strike from head to toe with one click and take out the vast majority of enemies quickly. Most of the enemies will flash when hit and emit a sound along with usually a pain state. This is the very minimum I expect from a game that involves combat. It does not do anything beyond this, though. Yes, there is a dash, but as I said earlier you don't really need it. There is also magic, but again, you don't really need it. There are a lot of stats in this game that you won't ever really care about. There's a lot of mechanics that you won't ever use. Do you get where I'm going with this? The designer put more mechanics in before they fully fleshed out any of the mechanics.  They're all functional, but none of them feel great.  Even fighting enemies feels bad in the trailer on the same page. It seems like the designer was trying to make it feel like a slower game than it is, especially when you can speed click enemies to death.  If I can speed click an enemy to death, why would I want to use dashing or magic? The main solution I can think of is to make the enemies more interesting. But that isn't in the game. 

As I said in the beginning, enemies will move left to right on a platform. Once they either hit the edge or the end of their patrol route they will turn around and go to their other edge.  This isn't bad for a starting enemy, but as far as I've gotten into the game, every enemy has this behavior. There are no static enemies that provide a combat challenge. There are no real flying enemies, aside from one that is placed slightly above your attack range. On that note, there are no range enemies for that matter. If they are found later in the game, like in the infinite dungeon, they are introduced too late to be relevant.  Combat ends up being one note and flat.  If there were more variance, it would make the game more engaging.  But as it stands, enemies don't add much to the game.

When you visit town, you will experience the trouble with UI.  You can open up inventory, magic, or whatever with a single button press.  That's not the issue.  The issue is when you want to do anything on the windows.  I was able to brute force myself into figuring out how to stash things, sell loot, and purchase potions.  I never could figure out how to upgrade equipment, however.  Sure, you can put your greaves in the upgrade window with components, but how do you actually do the upgrade?  The menu doesn't say, nor does it show anything helpful in the controls.  This game seems to revel in being obnoxiously obtuse.  For instance, you can not only open up the inventory, but you can open up the pets, magic, and trade windows all at once, too!  Not the type of thing you want to see in your UI.  At all.  Having more control explanation, possibly being optional to turn off in each menu, would go a long way towards making them more user friendly and understandable.

Does this game deserve to be put on the no-review list?  Maybe.  There is an interesting idea here, but it's either not fleshed out enough or not implemented well.  Pixel Knight feels like a game that was made by one person that did not get any notable feedback from playtesters before being released.  If it did get playtest time, it certainly wasn't blind playtesting.  And it made the game so much worse for that.  Yes, the game has a low price and yes, it's a relatively short play, but if the developer wanted it to actually find an audience, there needs to be a lot more work done, mechanically, artistically, layout-wise.  Considering I'm reviewing it years after the fact, I doubt it will ever reach an audience beyond the morbidly curious.  I certainly understand why it has no reviews after examining it, though.

I don't want to bash on this game any more than needed to understand why it's on the no review list, though, so I'll stop here.  If you are the developer and want to talk about Pixel Knight, please reach out!  I would love to hear what you went through designing this game and what process you had.  If you're just a listener and have thoughts on this game or this series, reach out below or on various social media.  My handle is @jcsirron.  This has been another Adventure Mechanics Side Quest.  I'll talk to you next time.

No Review Games on Steam: SpaceWorm

I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game.  In that pursuit, I'm reviewing Steam games with no reviews to get an idea of why they failed.  Here is the transcript for Space Worm: 

Welcome to the Adventure Mechanics, I'm Chandler. Today I wanted to try out something a little different from what I'm normally doing for these Side Quests. I've been looking at a number of games on Steam that don't have any reviews, and I was curious why they didn't.  Instead of just doing this for my own edification and keeping it all to myself, I've decided to turn it into something we can all learn from. And to start it off I found a small game that feels like Alien Invaders and Snake, with a dash of Vampire Survivors. So let's talk about it.

The game is Space Worm. Space Worm was developed and created by Brazilian programmer Filipe Izalon. He has a rather amusing website that is based off of what appears to be a Linux command line.  Although Space Worm is his only published game on Steam, he has produced a number of other games as shown on his GitHub page. And a quick look at that page shows that he's still developing games and tools. Most of his commits have been in the last year or so on a variety of different projects.  That's a promising sign. It means that he's not so disheartened by poor performance of Space Worm on Steam that he gave up on the discipline entirely. Although it does appear that he's been focusing more on tools rather than games as of late.

So what is Space Worm? It's actually a series of games made in PICO-8, one of which is similar to Snake mixed with Vampire Survivors, and the other which is similar to an old arcade game where you're just storing stuff for points. There's also technically a third game included, but it appears to be a cutscene only as far as I can tell. Let's start with our exploration of what the main game is, Space Worm.

In Space Worm you are unsurprisingly a worm that navigates the cosmos, eating stars and planets. There are other galactic-sized enemies with unknown motivations trying to stop you. You have the ability to shoot, upgrade, and use different special abilities in your pursuit of eating that cosmos.  It plays very much like Snake. You go around collecting stars and planets to upgrade your snake, and when you collect enough to level up you get a choice of three different icons, very much like Vampire Survivors. None of these icons are explained in-game, although they are on the Steam page. The game ends when you run out of life by getting overwhelmed by your opponents. What is great about this game? I actually love that this game is a marriage of Snake and Vampire Survivors. That's not something I was expecting to see, especially with a PICO-8 game.  The presentation is easy to get into and hard to master, much like Snake. That's a pretty powerful motivator to keep playing the game. Unfortunately, it's not exactly perfect.

To start off with the obvious, the Snake play area is finite. The theming of the game isn't, at least not really. If you go too far in one direction, you'll hit a wall with little or no feedback to where you are.  And although the sizzle reel in Steam shows that there is a white bar when you hit the edge, I didn't see that when I was playing the game. This can and will get you killed. The second is what I mentioned in the description of the game.  The upgrades have no description or glossary in-game to reference. This may have been okay with the arcades, where you could put all of that information on the cabinet itself, but not so much when you don't have access to a cabinet. Modifying the edge behavior and adding a glossary in the pause menu would go a long way to making this game feel a lot better.  It also does not have any noticeable music of any sort. I think that is another place that it could possibly improve.

The second game we have is called Consequence.  It is a simple abduction and destruction game. It has appealing graphics and a tight little gameplay loop. With the additional graphics it has, it actually feels more like a game than the headliner, Space Worm.  The only thing that's really missing from it is a soundtrack and a little bit of wonkiness with the controls I'll go into later. I'm somewhat surprised that Consequence wasn't the headlining game, to be honest. That's not to say it's a perfect game.  It doesn't have diagonal movement, which you'll surely feel when trying to avoid enemy projectiles. There's also no sound effect for  abducting people, which I think is a major missed opportunity to make the  game feel better. And one of the most cardinal sins I feel there is in a game  there isn't a way to go to the top menu without having to mash your keyboard. This applies to all games in the collection.

And the last game, if you can  call it that, is called Another Side. This seems to be the story trying to tie  the two games together.  Although I don't really get what is trying to be conveyed in the cutscene, I do appreciate that they put the effort in to at least have a cutscene. There's no hint that this is a non-interactive cutscene, at least from a player perspective though.
So why do I think this game doesn't have any reviews? The answer is rather simple. Polish. This game lacks a lot of polish. It does have a decent minute-to-minute game loop for each game that you can play, but it doesn't surface what's expected of the player. And for its price point, it's competing with things like its inspiration, Vampire Survivors. And that means the polish level needs to be close, if not on par, with its inspiration. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it needs to be the exact same quality level, just that it needs to have the same level of effort put into it, especially if you're taking inspiration from a game with such a high level of polish. I actually think that if this game had more juice, it would be more competitive. That means adding more sound effects and music, making it so you can navigate the menus in an obvious way, and quit the game without having to use Alt-F4, and exposing how mechanics work more transparently to the player. I think it would have found a wider audience if the level of polish was that high. It has a solid core in both games, but they just aren't quite tied together even with the extra story, at least not yet. And if we're spitballing here, I would actually take the level up system in Space Worms and apply it to Consequence as well. That would make both games feel like they're minigames inspired by Vampire Survivors.  And that would tie both of them together mechanically, not just thematically. I think this needs to be iterated over a couple more times with playtesters, at a minimum.  It's apparent that the game didn't really see much playtesting before it was released.  Otherwise the issues I brought up would have been at the very least surfaced to the developer, if not addressed.

So, closing thoughts. Does this game deserve to have been buried without a review? As it stands right now, maybe.  The reality is Steam has tens of thousands of games competing for your eyeballs. And this isn't one that's forward enough to demand your attention. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that it will be overshadowed by everything else that is.  And that's what we see with it. It's been out for just under a year and a half, at least at time of writing, with no user reviews to speak of. I think there's a good game in here, but it needs much more development time. And by that, I mean it needs to be polished. It needs a lot more polish. And if you happen to be the developer and are listening to this, I'd love to interview you and get your story on the game.

That's about all I had for this game, Space Worm. As always, if you have any comments or questions, reach out to me on either various social media as @jcsirron, or leave me a comment below. This has been The Adventure Mechanics, and I'll talk to you next time.