Dragon Quill

The Knight Witch is a shoot-’em-up Metroidvania, which is a pairing I haven’t seen since Hero Core in 2010. I’m usually not great at shmups, but I managed to fumble my way to the end and it was pretty enjoyable.

The most unique mechanic is a deckbuilding element, where you can equip a large number of spell abilities but only three are available at a time, chosen at random. I thought this was an okay idea that encouraged you to use spells often to cycle through your cards, but it was pretty awkward to be constantly flicking my eyes over to the corner of the screen to check my available spells while also needing to keep track of all the bullets and enemies flooding the screen. I think the biggest problem was that each of the three cards in your “hand” are assigned to a different button, preventing you from building up muscle memory since the function of each button changes constantly. You need to look at the cards to even know what your buttons do, during gameplay that requires you to make split-second decisions about which buttons to press. That’s kind of an intractable problem with the random card draws, though; I can’t think of a good solution other than limiting you to one available card at a time.

What I really want to talk about is the story, though. It’s an environmentalist climate change narrative. It does a surprisingly good job of this up until the end, where you (of course) solve climate change by punching it in the face. I think this merits some discussion.

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