Knock Knock: The One In Which I Soil Myself
Knock Knock didn’t start out scary. My dude was laying in his bed, and then he got up and started warbling at me in a Peanut’s adult kind of voice. He looked tired and a bit out of it, with seriously crazy hair, and his house was pretty off-kilter, but I didn’t feel frightened. The character looked pretty good as I shambled around his house turning on lights, and I started to get into the game when the door of the house suddenly banged and rattled, but it was just a cheap shot scare. I was worried that it was going to be a game full of sudden sounds and goblins leaping out from behind things, but nothing else like that really happened, even when I started walking through the dark woods. Then I re-entered my house, woke up in my bed again, and a small voice whispered “You thought it, so it came inside.” And then I pooped my pants.
This is a good game. If you like horror at all, you need to play it. If you like psychological mind fucks, you need to play it. If you like indie games with beautiful art, you need to play it. And probably the strongest recommendation I can give is that I have no fucking idea what the hell to say about this game. It’s almost impossible to really describe.
The gist (from what I understand so far) is that you are a very tired guy who keeps waking up in his bed at night, unable to sleep, because your house is . . . changing? You need to make it to daylight without completely losing your shit. That’s the whole deal, just wait until daylight. But you can’t, because there are noises. So many noises.
Repetition is the enemy of fear. When playing a horror game, like Deadspace for example, the first several times you have to go toe-to-toe with a baddie, it’s pretty scary. But after the 15th fight, it’s reduced more to an action/puzzle game – the anticipation and fear are mostly gone. Even the wonderful horror masterpiece Silent Hill 2 suffers from this. Knock Knock solves that problem by never giving you any idea what the hell is going on. It’s impossible to get used to the horror going on around you when you have no idea what it is, what’s causing it. The madness of the game really seeps into you.
As you wander around your house, weird ghosts (maybe?) sometimes show up and come after you, or other bizarre things occur that affect you. You don’t have a health meter, so when things catch you because you didn’t hide fast enough, instead something far worse happens than losing health. You lose time. If you lose enough time, you wake back up in bed at the beginning of the night, and have to do that night again. Except the house is different. Again. You have to pass MORE time at night, with those fucking noises and . . . THINGS. THINGS. THE EYE OH GOD THE EYE
*cough* Ahem. The brilliance of the game is this: you can’t die. You can only continue to be scared shitless. There is no way out. Not even death. Just endless horror. Knock Knock does an incredible job of building suspense, taking it to a crescendo, and then making you realize that WASN’T THE CRESCENDO IT WAS A FLOATING EYEBALL AND YOU’RE STILL IN THE DARK ALONE . . .You would not believe how much you start looking forward to those sunrises.
This game is really a gem – one of the most surprising and interesting experiences I’ve had at the keyboard in quite a while, and that includes rule 34. And here’s the best part: when you start it on Steam, it doesn’t try to install DirectX.
