If Knightmare Was a PC Game
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I'm not exactly familiar with Knightmare, a TV game show for children that was broadcasted in the UK from 1987 to 1994, but its overlap with the themes and aesthetic of old-school fantasy role-playing titles for PC convinced Richard Cobbet to write about a hypothetical RPG version of the show as a thought exercise for his latest Rock, Paper, Shotgun column. It's... quite a read:
The genius of Knightmare is that no two games are ever quite the same. You begin each time with a randomly selected party, though it must be said that most of the characters generated do tend to be of a certain mould squeaky-voiced, male, more than a little awkward. After that, Treguard the Dungeon Master ushers your lead character into the dungeon to begin, while the other three sit back as '˜advisors'. The amount of help they give is often questionable, but at least they don't tend to repeat too many lines, with the exception of '˜You're in a room'. This may lead to feelings of irritation after a while, or loudly yelling '˜No shit!' They also tend to struggle with basic concepts like '˜left and right'. Oh, for basic clock directions or something.
Sometimes your goal is randomly selected, other times you get to choose it but it typically involves retrieving some golden artifact that doesn't really seem to have any bearing on the case. Likewise, some rooms have multiple doorways, but it's hard not to feel like you're being pushed down a fairly specific, very linear path through most quests, with less raw .ameplay' than you might expect.
Early on especially you might start wondering if the designers have ever played an RPG. My first game ended, for instance, when picking up a sigil from a clue table, which seemed like a smart move when encountering another room with that sigil above its door, only to find out that I was merely meant to remember that and actually take a lamp instead. Gah! I know roguelikes have a justified reputation for difficulty, but it's rare to find one that wants to put the boot sorry the Silver Spurs into something squishy quite this early.
Fortunately, this level of bullshit proved relatively rare, though there were quite a few moments when ultimate success or failure did come down to a random choice. The second run through for instance running into a witch who wanted to do her hair, and only having soap instead of a comb. Another ended with a smug comment about picking up a weapon instead of a horn, as if anyone would just assume (Well, I might just randomly come across the walls of bloody Jericho.) Bloody RNG. It wouldn't be so bad if you could at least make saves whenever you wanted, instead of. let me just check. ah, yes. Never. Oh, well. Back to Level 1!
