Everyone knows how to play hide and seek. It is a very simple game in which the rules are straightforward and well-designed. But what if you had to play hide and seek with your nightmares in a constantly changing house until dawn? That is the core concept of Ice-Pick Lodge’s latest game, Knock Knock.
Players will take on the role of The Lodger, a scientist of sorts that lives in an old cabin/observatory in the woods. He, like his father, and his father before him, has lived here all his life running the observatory but, recently, things have been amiss. Lights are blown out, rooms are missing items, and weird noises can be heard throughout the night. Only at dawn do things return to normal. Reaching dawn each night is becoming harder and harder for the Lodger as his sanity slowly slips away. The difference between reality and his dreams is becoming less and less apparent.
At the start The Lodger must navigate the cabin, fixing lights and replacing missing items. As sounds echoed throughout the house, I was given the impression that something was lurking behind each door. And even though the game is presented as a cartoonish sidescrolling adventure, the noises were unsettling and put me on edge. The opening few levels of Knock Knock do a fantastic job of creating a very deliberate sense of unease. Eventually though, that unease washes away and Knock Knock becomes less about scares and more about being a weird puzzle game hybrid of Hide and Seek and home repair. That’s not to say that the horror aspects are abandoned; they remain intact with its creepily fragmented narrative about The Lodger’s descent into madness and his struggle to remain sane. Yet, at the same time, the game doesn’t seem to actively want to scare you.
The game is broken into two distinct parts: dreams and reality. In the dream world, when making one’s way through the house, the end goal is to survive until dawn. This is done mostly by waiting out the clock. One can’t just sit in the starting location as the inhabitants of The Lodger’s nightmares could appear in any room. Thus, one must work his way from room to room, repairing broken items while trying to avoid the ghosts and ghouls that are roaming the cabin. These creatures can be seen on screen by shutting the lights out in a room and zooming out to show a bigger swath of the house. This provides players with the ability to strategize how to best avoid them. Unfortunately, monsters spawning right on top of the player happens a bit too frequently and this can cause problems later on down the line.
On the other hand, in the real world, repairing the house is the primary priority so that one can unlock the front door and explore the surrounding forest to make sure everything is OK outside. These reality segments deliver further aspects of the story, by way of diary pages found strewn throughout the house, and allow us to see The Lodger’s mental state coming out of each dream segment. By the time you reach the end, it is pretty clear that The Lodger is a grade-A looney.
The core gameplay is extremely simple and could very quickly become boring. Thankfully, the developers keeps things consistently fresh. The cabin/observatory alters for each level, providing a new environment to learn each time out. Taking a wrong turn while running from a ghost can put your back against the wall, so learning the layout and making quick decisions is key. Failing to do so and just running through the game without a care spells doom for one’s sanity meter. That’s right: there is a sanity meter, and it is quite important to the overall outcome of Knock Knock. For some reason, it only appears about halfway through the game and its function is poorly explained. What I did gather is that if the sanity meter dissipates completely the player cannot complete the game. Oddly enough though, the game doesn’t end when that happens. Instead upon completion of the final level, players will be greeted with a tragic end and a Game Over screen, along with the option to Continue from the start of the last level.
I received the tragic “ending” four times before finally quitting in frustration and searching the internet for some explanation, which ultimately amounted to because my sanity meter was gone, my game was truly over and to get the “good” ending, I would have to restart. This probably goes without saying but I was not happy about three hours of playtime being negated because the game failed to explain a core concept to me. And that is where the game ultimately leaves me: unhappy and unsatisfied. It is a shame because I really did enjoy making my way through the different levels and exploring this world that Knock Knock had created. But, in the end, I felt I wasted my time. I’m not sure there is any graver misstep a game can make than that.
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