Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – a turn-based deckbuilding roguelike, where you fight against waves of enemies in a typical, 2D side view. Yet, Knock on the Coffin Lid is a rather unique spin on the genre, with a unique art style, rich lore, and an intriguing time loop premise. After its Steam release last year, an expanded version is finally hitting consoles, and we tested it for a long while on Xbox Series X!
I died, but I survived
Knock on the Coffin Lid is one of those games that start with an end of sorts – our warrior protagonist, Persival, dying a mysterious death with all of his crew. Via a mysterious character, he comes back to life, being given the unique chance of figuring out who killed him and his friends in a new, now virtually immortal form.
There is a catch, however. From now on, every time he dies, he goes back in time to when he reawakened in the crypt, allowing him to go through the same days, same events, same encounters, but with new decisions, strategies, and more. He can even choose completely different paths, if he so desires, all to try to figure out who did him dirty and, perhaps, get a well-deserved payback on him.
Like a rogue
Predictably, this is the title’s roguelite spin,with the player being sent back to square one after a failed run. Each time, the player can navigate on a top-down map, where they can choose, etween a series of branching paths, which encounters they want to do. Combat, treasure chests, side quests an,d more, the player has to select each point to determine where the next playable scenario plays out.
The most common ones will, naturally, lead to combat, and this is where Knock on the Coffin Lid’s gameplay loop comes through. It is a card game, a turn-based deck builder roguelite to be more exact, where our hero and eventual allies stand on the left from a side view, and the enemies on the right. The players get to spend a certain number of action points on attacks, defensive moves, and more, after which the enemy will do the same. Sounds simple, but there’s a decent depth to it.
Yellow card
Cards predominantly boil down to three kinds. The first allows the player to immediately attack one or more opponents. The second, the defensive type of card, lets us gain shields and pre-emptively block upcoming attacks. Lastly, there are utility cards as well, allowing a refill of the cards in your hand, switching statistics on your hero, and more. It’s up to the player to find out how to best balance out offensive efficiency with limited damage taken, as that is carried over to upcoming battles as well. Trust me, you don’t want to encounter certain major foes on low health.
The system is quite intuitive, with each warrior on the field very clearly showing their stats, but also what it is they’ll be doing next – attacking, increasing shields, healing, spawning allies, and so forth. This allows for accurate calculations of every effect we play, sometimes even letting us plan out future moves as well, assuming we’ll have the right cards to pull them off. As is often the case in deck-builders, the player can use certain skills and cards to manipulate the very cards they’re about to pick, adding extra planning into what would otherwise be a much more chance-based affair. Some actions don’t cost any energy, and the player can freely use one of 3 available potions at any time as well, further adding player agency in these already fairly deep combat encounters.
It’s complicated
There are a couple of aspects of these card-based battles that can lead to frustration, though. First of all, the difficulty is generally very high. Even on the second of the 4 available difficulties, most of the more difficult encounters, such as the map bosses, are tough as nails, and if the player didn’t manage to build a particularly strong deck yet, they have virtually no chance to get by. The game is, in fact, quite stingy with its builds, and I’ve only found a certain very narrow way to succeed. Invest in the wrong cards, and certain encounters simply can not be done. Add to that the whole inventory and gear system, allowing players to alter their strategies via armor, weapons, potions and more, and the depth is obviously there – but it’s hard to find a synergy that reliably works, and it all risks crashing down against a tough opponent before the player even had a chance to get all the elements they need for an efficient run.
All this, of course, means that we do carry over new knowledge towards further runs, perhaps telling us to avoid a specific encounter entirely, or at least, only tackle it with certain builds. But this leads to plenty of trial and error, as the map’s icons aren’t very readable, and the player’s memory i, first and foremost,t. This sort of issue pops up in other areas of the game, too – such as how the player can’t look at their inventory while shopping for new items at a tavern, or how opening up information on each item, when a reward is given after a battle, is seemingly glitched and never working. Even late game battles will see each combatant often display like 10 different status icons below, making it extremely hard to accurately calculate exactly what’s going to happen and in which order. Again, trial and error, as you will often select options that work out poorly for you, yet it’s not always clear how you should have known that beforehand.
You got style
All these issues turn an otherwise well-crafted deck builder into an often frustrating one, and it is quite bizarre how these issues persist. The game’s been out on Steam since last year, and the rest of the game is marvelously crafted and polished. An excellent art style with detailed and well-animated 2D characters, an enjoyable soundtrack, tons of dialogue, and unique quest texts, many of which are even brilliantly voiced. There is an undeniable amount of polish and fine-tuning of so many elements, so it feels weird to see the game falter in multiple key areas like that. There’s even been a handful of technical hiccups, such as a crash at the very end of a tough fight – the game allowed me to start that fight again, but it drained all the health I lost and the potions I used in the encounter! Needless to say, I lost that one. There are even various clunky and poorly functioning parts of the UI – hopefully that’s just some controller layout oddities that falter from the PC to console transition of this title, and that a patch or two can solve them.
One other area where the game struggles is the length and variety itself, which is very artificially inflated. Even beyond the usual twist of roguelite games, which always ensure the player gets in plenty of runs before getting to the finish, the game, simply put, pads out its limited content. There are only 3 main maps with very fixed encounters – players can choose different paths from time to time, but they’ll continuously end up doing the same things anyway. Further characters and traits for them can also be unlocked, but then these demand playing through the same sequences as well, making it so that you’ll have to blast through some mighty difficult runs several times to see all that the game has to offer, and there’s high chances you’ll get bored before all that. The final boss is downright impossible with most builds, so be prepared to maximize your efficiency before getting there – this, too, increases the frustration of seeing a great run shatter to pieces by the final difficulty spike of the game. After all that, there’s an additional challenge mode, offering shorter but more difficult encounters via modifiers, but they don’t add much depth to the overall package either.
Flip a coin
I’m torn on Knock on the Coffin Lid. When all elements align, it’s an audiovisually striking turn-based card game with an interesting lore, good player agency, and an addictive combat loop, one that’s easy to understand but hard to master. Yet, a series of difficulty spikes, an obtuse build system,m and a massive amount of repetition ensure that most of the hours spent in the game are wasted behind trial and error and replaying through many times seen before content, with even a handful design oddities that would need a quality-of-life patch or two. It could have been one of the finest card games on the console, but a handful of bizarre design choices don’t allow the game to reach its full potential.
Knock on the Coffin Lid
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Fantastic artstyle
- Great dub
- Addictive gameplay
CONS
- Often frustrating game design
- Massive repetition
- Incredible difficulty spikes
