Knights of the Cardboard Castle

It took me forever to realize that the people who made this game were also the ones behind Mark of the Ninja, which I really liked. The game genres are just so different though once again they make excellent use of stylized cartoonish graphics. Not much to say about this one since I barely touched its surface.

• It’s a rogue-like survivor, meaning you’re thrown into a hostile world with nothing and must scrounge and craft items to survive. Your character needs to eat and needs a source of light to fend off a mysterious monster that kills you in the dark of the night. In winter, you also need heat and probably warm clothing. There’s even a sanity stat. Being in the dark, standing in the rain with no shelter or just being near some types of enemies drains your sanity. When it drops too low, your character goes insane. The rogue-like part seems to refer to the fact that you can’t save and reload the game at will, i.e. the game autosaves when you quit a session but the savegame file is deleted when your character dies.

• You’ll encounter enemies too as you explore the world. The game even regularly spawns enemies that attack you, in increasing strength and numbers as the game goes on. So there are weapons and armour items to craft that help with fighting. The idea is that eventually every character succumbs.
• Still, unlike Terraria, the emphasis is very much on day-to-day survival. Your character needs food constantly. At the beginning you can get by with berries and carrots (though carrots never respawn), but eventually you’ll want to arrange more reliable supplies of food. This includes setting up farms, setting traps for birds or rabbits, hunting some of the larger animals for meat etc. At the same time, it is pointless to stockpile too much food because it spoils. Eventually your base will have things like a crockpot to cook in to increase the nutritional value of your food, a drying rack to preserve meat in the form of jerky, bird cages etc. Naturally you’ll need to defend all these from rampaging monsters and the weather. Having a lightning strike set all of your farms on fire can really ruin all your hard work.

• A very cool touch is that each time your character dies, you earn experience points according to how many days you’ve survived. These unlock other characters to use. Each character apparently has different stats and special abilities. The default one for example can grow a beard which can help him keep warm in winter. One girl has a lighter with infinite fuel, allowing her to create fire at will. But since I haven’t been able to even survive one full winter I haven’t experimented with other characters.
• There is apparently a separate Adventure Mode that you can switch to from the default Sandbox Mode that comes with a story, but again, I haven’t touched that all. It seems that there are other environments such as caves that I haven’t seen and boss monsters to fight.
• I do admire the game’s design and I completely get why a lot of people find this so appealing, but in the end, I’m too much of a savebaby to play according to the enforced Iron Man-style rules. I just get tired of dying and having to restart over and over again. Sure, you learn a little more about how to survive every time you die but it’s so tiresome to have to restart, explore the new map all over again, find a good location for a base and so on. Often I die for the dumbest of reasons, such as leaving off lighting the firepit in my camp until too late to save fuel and dying to the monster in the dark.

So kudos to the designers for an interesting and novel design and excellent execution. But this really isn’t my type of game. I really need to remember to stop buying rogue-likes and stick to games that allow save scumming.