The game is about the uprising from the grave that could almost end up in the coffin itself.
Knock on the Coffin Lid made by RedBoon studio, is a so-called card «bagel» that can be easily found on the early Steam access. You walk according to a schematic map, face random events, struggle with random enemies, and long to the finish through practically invincible bosses. There are three characters in the release. Each of them has its own mechanics and features.
The first impression proves that Knock on the Coffin Lid seems to be another clone of a popular indie game, but in reality, it has plenty of dignities that mark the game by RedBoon among the crowds of imitators. They are, for example, time loops, original gamer finds, settings of the nordic fantasy, and incomparable visual style.
Remarkably, the plot of Knock on the Coffin Lid (we’ll discuss it a little bit later) is connected with wonderful salvation from death because the game itself outlived something similar. As soon as it appeared in the early Steam access, the team of developers fell apart: someone left the project right after adding it to his profile and preferred another work in a bigger studio, and many others just left after him. Many people important to the game left — and the main game designer was among them.
The «bagel,» being raw and incomplete, literally stayed in the arms of a couple of people. There was no crew, no money, and no worthy attention of the audience that could help to attract new resources. Knock on the Coffin Lid was on the edge of spending eternity in the early access.
RedBoon successfully managed all their difficulties. Nowadays, the game is being developed by a new team of people, and they are really inspired by the idea of Knock on the Coffin Lid and want to bring it to the release. Recently a road map of progress appeared in the game, and there was also a large update with a variety of content.
In honor of this, we’ll explain to you why it is worth paying attention to Knock on the Coffin Lid — an excellent card rouge-lite with interesting gamer ideas, a nice visual style, and quite an unusual setting.
Death Is Not a Justification
There’s a split in the country: dwarfs and elves are at the threshold of a major war, and the only one to stop this senseless bloodshed through his authority and influence is The King of People and the Ruler of the Northern Gates Ingvar.
He goes to negotiations with his personal suite that consists of three heroes — the main characters of Knock on the Coffin Lid. Unfortunately, the truce wasn’t destined to happen — Ingvar and his detachment were poisoned on the road.
The chaos in the country started: dwarfs and elves committed a violent massacre, and at the same time, detachments of orcs advanced from steppes. The swamps are under the influence of a horrible cult, and bandits and deserters occupy forests. The Northern Gates suffer from an invasion of demons and atrocities of the local inquisition that decided to burn all the people for the sake of the salvation of the world (no matter if they are possessed or not).
And somewhere among this madness, there are three bodies of three heroes. They are soldier Percival, elf-Lycan Bjorn, and archer Vanadis. They all were the bodyguards of King Ingvar. And they would continue sleeping tightly if Knock on the Coffin Lids didn’t wake them up. It occurred that all three characters were resurrected by someone called Mortis. He did it only because of his kindness — he didn’t ask for anything in exchange for help and let them go.
Now the trinity had their only task: to come back home to the Northern Gates in order to find out what had earlier happened and what was going on at the current moment.
The idea of Knock on the Coffin Lid is somehow similar to Hades. It also tries to add to a genre that doesn’t usually have a harmonious plot, a pretty good story full of racy characters, mysteries, and events. Of course, it is far from the Supergiant games, but as a whole, a rogue-lite by RedBoon has quite amusing narration (especially compared with the industry colleagues).
It’s interesting not in the plot itself but in the structure. Your hero wakes up, gets a short briefing from Mortis concerning the state of affairs, and goes to the Northern Gates. A couple of fights, several mistakes, and he’s dead. A knock on the lid, the opening of his eyes — another resurrection comes. You came back to the past, and your death had never been — though you saw it with your own eyes.
Every unlucky race and the subsequent deaths are just an illusion and a variation of what could have happened to you. Only your rebirth, where you’ll be able to get to the end of completing your task, is real. In other words, you know all the events in advance: that you are going to die because of a hog if you choose this or that path, or you’ll have a fight with a leader of the horde if you decide to reach the Northern Gates through merciless steppes.
So your occasional adventure is not occasional at all. You can see events on the global map and explore step by step what they hide, threaten or bring. Thus you’re able to choose your adventure and history.
The Death During the Road
Knock on the Coffin Lid has the following gamer structure: you need to reach the castle in the Northern Gates. There are three locations available (the second one you should choose on your own) — swamps with cultists and vermins or the steppes with orcs and goblins. Each zone is full of stops containing fights, events, altars, traders, and bosses near the exit.
All the battles are held in a hiking mode of a card duel. There are no surprises: maps of damage, armor, improvements for the hero, and weaknesses for the enemies. Here you will also find efficient combinations, restrictions represented by scores of energy, and reinforcement of maps by achieving tune-ups and equipment.
At first, you’ll have only Percival, the most ordinary warrior. The features of his maps can be divided into two main styles: a defense game and storage of force for powerful attacks.
But there is a little trick. You don’t have a full deck of maps in advance — you need to collect them on your way. For example, if you won a fight with a monster, you received one card for it. If you won in a complicated event, you would get several more. This deck has not only gamer abilities mixed inside but various curses as well. They can bother your mission if you’re not lucky enough. But they can be excluded by a trader in exchange for money or during your rest in the camping. Equipment adds cards to the deck, too — for example, rare knives and swords that provide an opportunity for powerful attacks.
Interesting cases begin in nuances. For instance, you can change the gameplay by reinforcement and fines — just like in pacts from Hades. You can take a regeneration when receiving damage, a starting bag with gold, increased health, or force — they can ease your race.
At the same time, it’s necessary to equalize advantages with weaknesses by a decline in the quantity of gold received, reinforcement of the enemies, and the increase of their survivability. Each of the bonuses taken should have a proportionate fine. Of course, you can take nothing at all, but it’s so boring, isn’t it?
Percival, like all the rest of the characters, has four classes that are being opened with your progress of passing. They somehow correct your tactics. Percival the Gold Digger gets bonuses and fines according to the money available and several unique cards with effects depending on the budget.
Percival the Knight is more powerful with complete health and his hand not being mixed every single round. It helps to plan combinations further a few moves ahead and not only as part of a current one. Percival the Veteran is based on complicated combinations of his abilities — that’s why he has an increased volume of energy and special effects in a raffle of cards of one class from the very beginning.
The most interesting events begin when opening a new hero (at this moment, only two of them are available). Bjorn the Elf is completely another gaming experience. He is a local, a werewolf that shares his body with the spirit of a wolf and suffers from bloodlust.
All his mechanics except for the moves around the world. There is no energy for the cards, and the things that can increase it don’t appear. Bjorn acts out his health in exchange for his health.
After getting damaged five times in a row, he turns into a Lycan who attacks with reinforced power, applies special abilities, and is an unbalanced monster as a whole. In this condition, he acts out cards for notches. If a Lycan spends five of them during one move, he will calm down and turn back into a weak elf.
Bjorn’s idea is in balance. The appearance of a Lycan supplies him with huge advantages but also causes fines. The longer he exists in a beast guise, the more curses are being added to his deck. Bjorn will eventually die because of his own illnesses if he tightens the fights and abuses the forces. This is why you should quickly win the fights and follow the level of brutality.
In addition, it’s prohibited to spam attacks: as soon as you overdo with the cards in a werewolf mode, Bjorn will calm down and turn into an elf, thus losing the bonus to force and the opportunity to act out special cards.
The difference in gaming styles of characters and how it affects the gameplay of Knock on the Coffin Lid can be compared with various heroes in Devil May Cry. Characters like the elements of one game allow you to look at it from different points of view and pass the same moments completely in another way.
The characters vary not only in fights. Each one has his own role in history, dialogues, and interactions with random events. For example, if a drunk dwarf suggests Percival go to the elf camping and give those pointy-eared bastards cuffs, then Bjorn will be immediately attacked by a bearded man just because he’s an elf, too!
Unfortunately, the third hero, the archer Vanadis, is not ready yet; she will appear closer to release. But according to the two available heroes (and the four classes of each of them), we can assume that she will also have her own unique gameplay, events on the map, and an important role in history.
The Killing Beauty
One more distinctive feature of Knock on the Coffin Lid is its setting and style. Developers create their unique world from vivid images by operating the archetypes of classic fantasy (orcs, elves, dwarfs, trolls, and other characters).
The first zone where the war between dwarfs and elves is being held is inspired by the Northern culture that is close to Scandinavians and Slavs. Here elves and dwarfs are not the highest races but someone like classic literature Vikings who go to the sea by the Drakkar’s and wander through a frozen district with half-naked torsos and helmets with horns. They use axes and wooden shields instead of magic blades, and the beast idols and war paint instead of age-old wisdom.
There’s also a place for funny visual references.
The deserted region with orcs and goblins reminds me of stories about Conan the Barbarian. It combines brutality, the same half-naked torsos of cruel warriors (because the armor is for weaklings!), hot black iron, and the omnipresent thorns on a few armors. There are also sandy worms — how could it be otherwise?
Swamps strongly remind me of Darkest Dungeon because of cultists, mutant beasts, the undead, bloodlusty beetles, and horrible diseases. The Northern Gates are very similar to the final act of Diablo. Insane inquisitors, demons, and vermin are everywhere, and it all couldn’t be described using words. And the setting itself is bowing down to the Northern side again: design is made in the spirit of the Holy Roman Empire. There also are gloomy cities in the middle of mountains and forests — just like in Warhammer Fantasy Battles.
Certainly, there’s nothing exotic in Knock on the Coffin Lid design. It contains many classic stamps that you could somehow see in other media. But the two artists of the project worked with each image using creativity and interesting visual ideas. Somewhere they mixed famous styles and somewhere invented something unique. That’s why old and trivial things look fascinating and fresh.
There are very cool animations in this game, too.
In other words, the game is very beautiful. You can see here unbelievably alive and smooth animations, the perfect job with colors and nice backdrops. Of course, there are still many things to be done: some cards don’t have pictures, and there are several sprites with unpainted tiny details and shadows, But Knock on the Coffin Lid as a whole looks very worthy — especially in its niche of the card «bagels.»
The sound of this game is also very good: its sound design is excellent. It completes the atmosphere of each location, zone, and situation and does it in the most wonderful way. An amazing soundtrack, together with rich sounds, nature’s ambient, and small details, suit the game. For instance, an elf tied up in a fight with a mad troll will interrupt the silence with his cries for help through the rag. Wolves will be howling, and the birds will be singing during the forest battles.
***
We can’t call Knock on the Coffin Lid a special event or phenomenon in its genre. This is a quite usual project that, at the current moment, differs from an ordinary clone only in several interesting finds and its own method of plot submission. The force of the RedBoon game is hidden in the performance quality.
Even now though it’s not finished yet, it feels better and more complete than the majority of other releases. Mechanics are interesting; history is good and visual style is terrific — at least, for its genre.
So far, the game has problems: there are still troubles with balance besides rare little bugs and unfinished content. I didn’t ever succeed in passing the swamps, but the orcs’ deserts didn’t cause any problems with both Percival or Biron characters. But I didn’t notice anything that couldn’t be fixed by ordinary patches of balance and edits in the updates.
Moreover, if we judge according to the road map of the project, RedBoon is going to solve the problem of similarities with their competitors, too. Mechanics of missions and dungeons will appear in the future to make you’re passing something more than a usual move forward along the dotted map. A special gameplayer mode is also expected to appear — The Nightmares of Millennials — it’s connected with one of the characters from the plot.
Let’s hope that RedBoon will have enough resources and forces to cope with all its ambitions, and the idea will not only live until the release but work after it.
We wish good luck to the studio and recommend fans of games from CIS to get acquainted with it — especially if you’re not tired of the card genre that has become very popular in the last few years.
