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.

The story beings by telling us that greedy capitalists drained the planet’s resources and devastated the environment, just like in real life. But in this story, magic is real, and believing in people makes them stronger. This allows for the creation of the titular Knight Witches, heroes who have godlike power due to the faith everyone has in them. They ultimately kill the CEO in a massive battle that reveals a massive cave system that was conveniently developed into an underground city by an ancient civilization. Everyone flees the now-uninhabitable surface for the safety of the underground.

The plot begins 14 years later, following a failed Knight Witch named Rayne. We learn the underground city only remains habitable due to powerful technology built by the precursors, and as you can probably guess, it’s eventually revealed it runs on evil fossil fuels that are killing the planet, so you have to destroy it. Along the way, we also learn that the narrative around the Knight Witches was largely manufactured and whitewashed to give them more power, and a major mechanic is choosing whether to be honest with the public or to feed them comforting lies for greater power. (I was worried this was leading to a reveal that actually the capitalists were the good guys, but fortunately no.) Tying into this is a racial subplot where it’s revealed the Knight Witches killed a lot of a particular ethnic group who served the capitalists during the war, but this was erased in favor of a narrative that they only fought robots. Towards the end, Rayne also discovers that her empathic power is a double-edged sword, as the Knight Witches feel everyone’s fear and anxiety as well as their love, which inevitably drives them insane from stress.

So, yeah, that’s a lot. I think the first stumbling block is that the story tried to do too many things at once. It’s a climate change allegory and a critique of institutional corruption and racial commentary and a deconstruction of “clap your hands if you believe” and a psychological examination of heroes. That’s a lot of topics to cover in a 15-20 hour game! They’re related topics, so it does make sense to tackle them all at once, but there’s just not enough time or space to do them all justice. Most topics are only able to be touched briefly, and are rarely set up cleanly. In particular, I felt like the racial stuff came out of nowhere, despite there being plenty of opportunities to lay groundwork for it earlier. I would have appreciated if early NPC dialogue could have given us more worldbuilding about the current social structure, instead of being entirely focused on Rayne personally.

Most of these topics are still handled well, or at least not actively badly (we are working with a very low bar here, after all), but I think they also muddy the climate change allegory. The Knight Witches, the Link, and the propaganda campaign surrounding them were all very interesting ideas, but they don’t make a lot of sense when applied to the allegory. Climate activism isn’t a movement that relies a few heroic public figures; it’s a necessarily amorphous movement that relies on collective action. And by that I mean actual action, not passively believing in the cause. I don’t think the writers intended to say the solution to climate change is for slacktivists to send good vibes to Greta Thunberg and do nothing else, but it’s hard to see how else the Link is supposed to be applicable to climate change. I think the Link would make more sense for a traditional war narrative, which does have a strong separation between combatants and civilians that limits what the latter can do for the former. (That’s also a situation that’s more invested in the concept of heroism.)

The climate change narrative itself is also muddied by effectively splitting itself into two separate but unrelated environmentalist narratives that are handled very differently from one another. The first, the planetwide disaster we see in the prologue, was the one I thought was done much better. The evil CEO is a pretty blatant allegory for Elon Musk and similar technofuturists who believe the solution to climate change is to do it all again on another planet, and though the heroes defeat him, the planet is still ruined, because killing the Big Bad doesn’t magically undo the harm they caused.

Unless you’re Rayne, in which case it does.

See, after Rayne sees a vision from God telling her that fossil fuels are evil, she decides the Machine (that we’re explicitly told is the only thing keeping the last bastion of civilization habitable) needs to be destroyed, because it runs on fossil fuels. Instead of telling anyone why fossil fuels are bad or if she has any plan for how people are supposed to survive this, she just tells everyone the Machine needs to be destroyed. The guy in charge tells her she sounds insane and brands her an enemy of the state, which is portrayed as evil but is actually a completely logical response to someone declaring an intent to murder-suicide your entire civilization. This destroys Rayne’s Link due to everyone turning against her, causing you to lose the powers you’ve gained over the course of the game. Rayne destroys the Machine but oh no, it’s too late! Fossil fuels have created an eldritch abomination that’s going to destroy the world! Upon seeing this, everyone admits they were so wrong and now they’ll totally help her stop the Climate Change Monster now.

This last part annoyed me, especially after the prologue did so well in establishing the previous villain as thoroughly selfish. The people driving climate change in real life are not ignorant. They know exactly what they are doing, and they don’t care. They are willing to kill everyone including themselves if it will make number go up. They’ve known the risks for half a century, and we know they know. Portraying environmental despoilers as simply misguided tech enthusiasts who would totally stop climate change if only we could explain the dangers to them is frankly, at this point, propaganda. Perhaps the writers did this because the villains’ motivations in real life are so cartoonishly evil and flat and they wanted more interesting characters, but I’m sorry, if you want to do political commentary you have to commentate on the actual situation, not the sanitized version that makes for a better story.

So how does this resolve? Rayne punches out the Climate Change Monster, then talks to God, who says LMAO I’m out it’s your problem now. Rayne becomes the new God and uses her powers to fix all the climate problems, the end. (Why didn’t you do this earlier if that was an option, God?)

I would say this is an intractable problem of telling a climate change allegory through the medium of a video game where your solution to everything has to involve violence… but Radiant Historia successfully avoided this pitfall if you ignore the remake as you should, so no, this is just a lack of imagination. I think fundamentally, a big part of why climate change is so hard to fight is because it not only can’t be fought through traditional means, but those means actually make it worse. The power fantasy that video games indulge, of constantly becoming bigger and better so you can destroy every obstacle in your way without concern for inconveniences like finite resources and collateral damage, is the same fantasy that is creating climate change in the first place. Capitalism’s desire for infinite growth is what got us into this mess; you can’t get us out by cleaving to the same principles.

The unfortunate truth is that reversing climate change at this point is going to be very, very painful. Even if the obstacles to doing so were removed, shutting down the modern industrial machine is going to have consequences. It’s going to require us to give up most of our modern comforts — 24/7 electricity and internet, cheap plastics, cheap meat, international shipping, year-round access to produce. And for some people, those aren’t comforts but necessities — hospital patients need 24/7 electricity and many disability aids require plastic. If you smash the Machine, you smash those people too. Do you have an alternative source of care lined up to catch those people? The Knight Witch ignores this question. No one asks how everyone will survive without the Machine, least of all Rayne. You destroy the thing everyone needs to survive but it’s fine because a literal deus ex machina comes in to fix it. All the while, there is no actual resource crisis — the robots you fight and the crates you smash for pickups both respawn endlessly. The bullets you spray everywhere never permanently damage the environment.

I believe for a video game to be an accurate allegory for climate change, it needs to be a fantasy of loss rather than gain, of weakness rather than power. It should make us understand the fact that a sustainable future requires us to sacrifice things we take for granted. (And if it absolutely must have a Climate Change Monster, make it a puzzle boss that can’t be defeated through traditional combat, because you can’t put out a fire with gasoline.) A video game could, in fact, convey these things better than any other medium! But of course, such mechanics would by their very nature run contrary to the appeal of most video games, so we’re unlikely to see such a thing outside of the ghetto of weird art games played by like five people.

I don’t want to fault the game too much, because this is really hard. I think it genuinely tried, and losing your powers in the final stretch (combined with forcing you to give up power if you want to do the right thing) is at least gesturing in the right direction. It does better than most of its contemporaries and does draw attention to some important issues. But our games really need to step up their game if they want to send a serious message about climate change.