#IndieSelect: Aldred, Knight of Honor (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a free copy of Aldred, Knight of Honor on the Nintendo Switch from developer/publisher QUByte Interactive through Indie Gamer Chick and Indie Gamer Xin's #IndieSelect.  The game was given and accepted without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and experiences are shared through social media channels.  All of the words in this article unless otherwise noted are my own from my own experience playing Aldred, Knight of Honor.

As far as medieval-themed retro-styled platformers go, Aldred, Knight of Honor on Nintendo Switch has a lot going for it while maintaining an SNES era retro feel and still falters in a couple of instances that come across as cheap shots against the player.

Alfred, Knight of Honor starts off with the standard backstory for why Aldred is running, jumping and honorably killing his way through the kingdom.  Standard Big Bad Evil Guy wants to take over everything and you are sent out to stop him by traveling through variously themed stages vanquishing evil and rescuing captured prisoners.  Both the single pane form of prologue storytelling and graphical choice are very reminiscent of both Devious Dungeon by Ravenous Games/Woblyware, and Daggerhood (also) by Woblyware.  

Let us start off with some of the criticisms I have for the game, because ending on a high note is much more respectable, and because I have a lot more negative things to say about the game than positive, so the next couple of paragraphs might be kind of rough.

The first of those criticisms being that you start off the game with the ability to double jump.  Maybe it is because I come from the school of Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night where you earn the skill to double jump, and I realize how gate-keepy that sounds.  For me, I want to earn the ability to double jump because it seems like such a high-level ability that borders on the stance that if you have double jump from the start, why not just lower the height of platforms or just extend the jump height?  That is just nit-picky and I recognize that.

On the topic of mechanics, one thing that has annoyed me on more than one occasion is that the Y-Button is used to both attack, and to talk to the shopkeeper who often appears halfway through most of the stages.  When you are near the shopkeeper and press Y, you are unable to attack any enemies that are also near you, but instead, the shop menu opens up so that you can make purchases.  The problem here is two-fold.  The first being that when you press Y and expect an attack to happen but doesn't, that is going to be annoying in-and-of-itself.  The second is that when you are in the shop menu, you are susceptible to attacks from enemies, which can become a serious issue if you go to attack a flaming skull only to have the shop menu open and while trying to navigate out of the menu in a panic, the flaming skull attacks you again and kills you.  Yes, this did happen to me on one occasion.

The other issue is one that I have seen a lot of people complain about is how the layout of some of the levels can lead to traps or enemies being off the screen and when over half of your game is built around exploring the area to either collect purple coins or to release captured prisoners, this type of level design can come across as cheap.  In some instances, the screen will move down so that you are able to see the top couple of pixels of a platform, possibly to try to get the player to be a little more patient than they might be otherwise in an action platformer, but in other instances, the drops can lead to pits or monsters.

Something irritating is that there are no effigies to destroy or prisoners to
rescue in the last level in Stage 1, but there is still the same grey box
showing what you have collected and what you are missing.

Something that I would definitely add to the game is the ability to go back to the Stage Map screen.  As the game stands currently when you start the game from the main menu, you select which stage you want to start in on, and when you complete that level you automatically move onto the next stage.  To go back to the map screen, you have to exit back to the main menu, select Continue, then select which level you want to play.  It is just a couple of extra steps, but in a game that visually shows you which items you missed in the stage or if you missed rescuing a prisoner, going back to a level select screen in as few steps as possible should be something to consider.

And while we are on the topic of collecting items in games, I want to bring up how that information is tracked and what effect it has on the overall game.  When you select which level you want to play, you can see if you missed any of the collectibles in a stage.  What effect that has on the overall game is, at least after completing the first stage, unclear.  The game does not keep a running score and picking up collectibles through every level has no bearing on the game, except for the three pieced medallion(s?) which increases your health (and presumably) other attributes depending on the color of future medallions (if there are any).  Lastly, the game keeps a running total of the number of creatures you have killed in each level, but that total resets in each level and every time you die and respawn.  In Devious Dungeon, you are awarded coins for having a large kill streak, but in A,KoH, again, it is unclear.

Lastly, one thing that I would add to the game are purely cosmetic changes.  There are two enemies in the game, one is a large shielded knight wielding a war-hammer who only attacks when it drops its guard, and the other is a large purple creature with golden armor who jumps at you and pounds the ground.  Both enemies wield large weapons (war-hammer, fists) but when their respective weapons hit the ground or Aldred, there is no additional sound or visual effect.  No booming crunch, no screen shake.  And there are events in the game that do cause the screen to shake, like when Aldred destroys one of the evil markers/effigies.  But here, with these two large enemies who do take more than the standard two hits to kill, there is nothing to give weight.

You're really going to want the sound on for this one since it's part of my point here.

Hokay!  Now the good stuff.

Alfred, Knight of Honor is a fun game.  The game story is pretty basic, or at least as complex of a story as the original Super Mario Bros. but for the type of game that Aldred, Knight of Honor wants to be, it does not need to be any more complex.  It is definitely a game that you can pick up for 30 minutes, play, pick up again a week later and not be confused as to what you were previously doing or how the controls work.  The music is also pretty good and definitely charming, but by the time you reach the second stage (the second map) I was hoping for some new tunes to match the new map palette, but sadly the same music was playing in the background.  There are some minor RPG aspects to the game like collecting gold that is used to purchase immediately consumed potions or one-time upgrades that boost your health, magic, item drop rate and the power-up ability that increases your attack speed, damage, and defense; oh yeah, there is a one-time-per-stage ability that covers your body in armor, increases your speed, damage, and defense.

JUMP!!

Oddly enough, despite nearly 59.01% of this article coming across as critical of Aldred, Knight of Honor.  I still think it is a fun game and the $1.99 price point is pretty damn cheap for there being at least 22 levels (not having finished the second stage at the time of writing), although I would not be at all surprised if there was a third and final stage after Stage 2, but by the looks of the trailer, there could very well be a total of five stages.  And the key point here is that the levels do not come across as filler either, at least during Stage 1.  And even after earning an item after beating the Stage 1 boss that allows access to previously closed off areas, there is a little bit of back-tracking that is purely optional if you want to further beef up Aldred.

So go ahead and give Aldred, Knight of Honor if you are looking for a decently packed game,in terms of content, and want something fun to play between bouts of Dark Souls or Darkest Dungeon.  Because sometimes a good ole hack-and-slash platformer is really all you want.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Let It Guide You Through The Dark