Ed Note: This writeup was written prior to the release of the 1.2.6 version of Knuckle Sandwich. The 1.2.6 update added an extra item slot, balanced party members, “Added level increase to late-game party members during regular difficulty runs,” and major buffs to every single held item. In short, it makes some changes to a large number of the things I complained about. I don’t think it’s enough to fix the game, but I find it both worth noting, and somewhat vindicating.
I don’t recommend Knuckle Sandwich for reasons that are hard to summarize. In short, the game fails to live up to its spiritual predecessors in either mechanics or narrative, while making a variety of design decisions I disagree with, and that make it frustrating to play.
Genre-wise, Knuckle Sandwich is technically an RPG. It meets virtually every part of the general definition we have for those games, so it’s unfortunate that I think the term is actually useless here. I think a more accurate descriptor would be “weird RPG,” which is to say something very much in the vein of Earthbound, Undertale, or No Delivery.
The main reason I simply cannot recommend Knuckle Sandwich is that Undertale exists. I think there’s a strong argument that Undertale does literally everything except (some parts of) combat better than Knuckle Sandwich.
I also can’t really recommend Knuckle Sandwich to people who loved Undertale, because the game is just universally worse. I don’t like having to say that. Knuckle Sandwich isn’t phoned in, or low effort. It’s just not as good as the games that have inspired it.
Here’s why.
Combat
Combat is the heart of Knuckle Sandwich’s mechanics. There is some exploration. There are some puzzles. But in both cases, they are fairly minor. The vast majority of this game is its combat.
While Knuckle Sandwich starts with the traditional RPG blueprint (a basic attack, a mana system (EP) for special attacks, HP bars, etc.) it quickly makes changes to the system. All attacks, from both the player and enemies, involve playing a WarioWare style mini-game of some sort.
I’m going to go into lots of detail, mostly in order to justify the level vitriol I’m going to be leveling against someone’s long term passion project.
Let’s start with the player basic attack.
There are three basic attack mini-games. This brings up the first problem: which one you get is random. Which would be fine if they were equivalent in terms of damage. But that was not my experience.
They’re also just kind of frustrating to play, with some taking much longer than others. They take a long time to start up. You can skip the wait by pressing a button, but that same button is used for the damage input. So if you get impatient, try to skip, and accidentally double tap, you miss a turn.
Next up, the player’s special attacks. After 10 hours, and at max level, I had 4 special attacks. I was given one to start, got two from leveling up, and had a fourth from an equipped item.
This is an INCREDIBLY small amount of options, and many of the attacks are just bad. A 4 turn 1 point defense buff is awful, and I barely ever used it.
Finally, there’s also a defense command that regenerates a single point of mana and ups defense. But because of how enemy attacks work, it almost always felt like a mistake to use this.
Since some special attacks are granted by equipment, let’s talk about items real quick. Characters have 3 slots: a left hand, a right hand and an accessory. I only saw about 3 weapons total throughout the entire game. Two were knives and one was a pair of scissors. There were also several pairs of gloves that boosted defense, but since they took up both the left and right hand slot, they didn’t feel worth using. The strategic options are again, incredibly limited.
More annoyingly, equipped items take up inventory slots. This would be tolerable except each character can only carry eight items. This means if a character has three items equipped, they can only carry five other items.
This isn’t helped by the fact that key items have to go into your inventory. So if you find a key needed to open a door, you either have to toss items out, or backtrack to an item storage PC.
There are lots of design decisions in games that are subjective and up for debate. The item limit in Knuckle Sandwich is not one of them. It’s a bad system. It punishes equipping items, it punishes exploring for extra items that the you can’t carry, and it punishes carrying quest or bonus items with you in case they have a fun interaction or might be useful later. I hate it.
Before we fully dive into the rest of Knuckle Sandwich’s combat, I want to talk about how the game interfaces with with some other standard RPG mechanics. These are: party members, stats, and leveling.
In combat, you can use the player character, plus up to one other character. There are 3 primary party members, and a few more that join at various points. But for a vast majority of the game, you only have a maximum of one other party member available.
And for the brief portion of time while you have access to all of them, there’s no reason to use any party member but the highest level one. Experience points are not shared across the party. As such, one member will always be significantly higher leveled than the others.
It’s a really questionable structure. Combined with the fact that it’s hard to tell what stats even do, it makes me wonder why the game even has levels. In addition, enemies don’t respawn, so grinding levels isn’t even an option if for some reason you did love a specific character.
So let’s talk about better parts of Knuckle Sandwich: the rest of the combat. There are two types of enemy attacks: standard attacks, where you can press a button to avoid all the damage, and the mini-games. For the standard attacks, enemies will perform some sort of mini-animation with a tell. Press a button right after the tell, and you’ll dodge the attack.
The individual mini-games are generally more fun, and are fairly varied. Some are shmups, there’s an infinite runner, and several are Wario-Ware like quick reflexes.
Some are less fun, like the one that asks you to do math very quickly.
But while I did call this the good part, that’s not entirely accurate either. Because while the individual mini-games are fun, they’re not hugely fun to play over and over and over. And combat really drags on.
And I have a problem with the bosses as well. To keep this brief, here’s a summary: Knuckle Sandwich has many boss fights where you don’t progress by “winning.” Instead, you defeat them by tiring them out, or just engaging with a separate system. As a player, since I didn’t know which fight was which, I ended up wasting resources and effort on fights where I didn’t need to, and that feels bad.
At it’s heart, the problem with Knuckle Sandwich’s combat system is that it just doesn’t have much strategic space. Many of the RPG mechanics feel ancillary to the real time mechanics, and the real time mechanics are a mixed bag that quickly becomes repetitive.
But now let’s talk about the story.
Story
From here on out, there will be spoilers for every part of Knuckle Sandwich. You have been warned.
My primary problem with Knuckle Sandwich’s story is that it feels unconnected. It hits all the story beats of the weird RPG. A weird world, bizarre characters, strange non-logic, and friends. But many of these don’t feel earned, or even internally consistent.
I’m not a writer, so I can’t break down exactly why the story didn’t work for me. Instead I’m going to give three or so examples.
Let’s start with cannibalism.
Early in the game, you’re attacked by a character while taking out the trash at your job. You kill the attacker while defending yourself. Then you have to chop up this person you murdered and serve them as burgers. Your boss gives a whole speech, and a bit about how you’re now in this together. This seems to be setting up for a sort of Barber of Seville situation, where the player is going to have to murder people who won’t be missed, and cook them.
Except none of that happens and the game seems to immediately forget about this plot thread until the literal Final Boss. Yes, those letters are capitalized on purpose. In retrospect, there are hints at what is going on, but the whole thing is mostly just… never mentioned.
Instead, you meet the other party members, and the characters that the game seems to suggest are your friends. But for some reason they don’t really feel like your friends. The biggest one for me is that your character is mostly just dragged in wake of these “friends” instead of actually joining them.
There’s also a big mechanical reason why they don’t feel like your friends. The “friend” characters don’t actually join the party until later in the game. At that’s where the RPG design really gets in the way encouraging you to only use one of them. While they’re all given their own sub-sections of the narrative where you work with them, those sub-sections don’t focus on those characters as people.
This matters because when Knuckle Sandwich later tries to pull a big emotional event, it lands flat. It’s sorta sad, but I wasn’t attached enough to these characters for it mean much. Likewise, when the game tries to do the “kill god with the power of friendship,” that moment fails equally.
None of Knuckle Sandwich’s supporting cast were given enough time for me to become really attached to them. I don’t dislike them as characters at all. But I feel about them the way I feel about my neighbors. Perfectly nice people. If they asked for help, say shoveling snow or jumpstarting a car, I’d be on it. But there’s no real emotional connection outside of a polite mutual ignorance.
All that out of the way, let’s talk about the biggest plot point of Knuckle Sandwich. You only get to know about it because it’s explained in a monologue in the game’s ending sequence. The whole game is…. actually, I don’t need to say what it is. Because it doesn’t matter!
The big reveal is barely relevant to the entire rest of the game. It isn’t really mechanically present, it isn’t brought up until after it’s been dealt with off-screen by an NPC. And then the game just kind of ends. You, the player, effectively never have to deal with it, outside of one very short semi-postgame sequence.
The vibe I get from Knuckle Sandwich is that the game was made in sections, instead of as a whole piece, and also made under a weird deadline. There are large sections of the game that feel sprawling and unconnected, and others that feel rushed and compressed. If you told me that Knuckle Sandwich as it currently stands is about 30-40% of the game that the creator had in mind, I’d believe you.
But the end result is failure to deliver on both the weirdness of the world and the attempted emotional story beats. Instead, it feels like a set of strung-together vignettes or dream sequences.
Art
This is going to be the one part of this writeup that isn’t me just trashing 5 years of someone else’s work. While I have no strong feelings on the game’s music, I do really like the art. I really don’t enjoy the glitched sections, but I think the animations and art style for almost every other part are great.
The art also feels high effort. For example, the weapon equip system is a bit nuts (in a good way). The game seems to have sprites for each character carrying each item. Personally I’m very curious as to how it all works behind the scenes.
But there’s something else I want to talk about. There’s a single thing about Knuckle Sandwich that I really love. And that is a very specific tone that the game manages to evoke. I don’t know if it’s even intentional, but I love it nonetheless. The primary character of Knuckle Sandwich spends the game with a bruised face, and bags under their eyes, and in my playthrough used knives and scissors as weapons.
The end result is a character who looks utterly defeated, and yet chooses time and time again to square up against cult members, robots, mecha suits, and alien gods. They get up, and they keep moving forward. There’s a distinct tone of simply not caring anymore that I find incredibly unique. I can’t think of another game that made me feel like this.
It’s doesn’t redeem of the rest of the game, but it is memorable.
Conclusion
Knuckle Sandwich is made with heart, and I wish I could recommend it. But the game simply isn’t fun to play. Its strategic elements are light to non-existent. Its real time tactical elements are enough of a mixed bag that they can’t make up for the lack of strategy. The story, while not a mess, feels poorly paced, and manages its plot points badly. The music is fine, and the art is well-made, but those things don’t make the rest of the game fun.
On the flip side, at least Knuckle Sandwich was made by someone who appears to give a shit. I don’t know that I’d purchase another Andy Brophy game on day one, but I’d at least look at it. Knuckle Sandwich might not be worth playing, but it’s not something that should be ignored. And if somehow this post has convinced you that Knuckle Sandwich is what you need, you can find it here.
Ed Note 2: Images are from the Steam Page, and Knuckle Sandwich press kit. I played this on my Steam Deck, and didn’t take screenshots. Frankly, I’m not replaying just to get screenshots.