Knights of Pen and Paper began its life on iOS, made by Behold Studios, where my friends met it with a mix of praise and complaints about their phones getting incredibly hot. Now, thanks to Paradox, the pixel art RPG about playing an RPG has come to PC, with an array of improvements. However, while the game is clever and fun to play for short stretches, its mobile roots come through, making it a little hard to play for longer stretches of time.
At its core, the game is a pretty solid implementation of basic RPG concepts. You have five players, with six classes to choose from at the start, and six more unlocked during play. A paladin or a warrior might tank, a druid or cleric might heal, and a rogue or mage might do damage. Once you have your starting characters, the game begins, with the players and dungeon master conversing at a table as the action plays out in the background.
The game’s premise alone was enough to charm me, between the metanarrative aspects (The dungeon master, when pressed on a character’s name, insists that the character itself doesn’t remember, saving him the embarrassment of having to admit he doesn’t know, for instance) and the nods to tabletop gaming tropes, like rolling for encounters as you move across the overworld or rest in dungeons. The pixel art is all cute, the music is bouncy and pleasant, and while the fights weren’t groundbreaking, there’s enough depth in the setup and execution to be fun.
The setup for fights is pretty clever. Since you’re nominally playing the dungeon master as well as the players, you design the counter, mixing and matching several types of enemies per zone to decide what quests you’re trying to complete. Still, I found myself, even building without a real eye towards optimizing, being able to take down as many of the enemies I needed to take down in a single fight, which made some of the options sort of superfluous.
Once the fights start, each class has a basic attack and up to four active abilities. The paladin can shield himself from damage or boost his attack to taunt, the rogue can go for a double strike or disable enemies, and the mage has a variety of elemental attacks that either hit the entire enemy party of inflict status effects. The fights usually end quickly, but the ones that go longer have a tendency to wear on, and I ended up wishing there was a way to hotkey abilities to go through them quicker.
Honestly, this is the game’s main downfall. While there’s plenty of options in fights, there doesn’t seem to be a huge variety in the situations you face. I’ll always have my mage cast meteor against big groups and fireball against smaller ones, or have my druid use her bleed ability unless the party needs health or mana. The game’s mobile roots show through, in that the best way to play it is still in ten or fifteen minute bursts, and I’d often find myself leaving it open on Steam and turning its sound down until I had a few minutes of idle time to kill. Any longer and I’d start to feel a little burned out.
All told, Knights of Pen and Paper is a good game, but one that I’d prefer to play on the bus or when waiting in line, rather than when I’m sitting at my computer. Luckily, +1 Edition is also on iOS and Android devices, which is much more amenable to sitting around and grinding for a few minutes. Between the expanded plot, extra areas, and deeper combat than the original, the game’s worth a look.
