Knightfell for it.

Tearing my hair out trying to learn to code NAC's future web framework hasn't left me with a lot of time to play the games I would like to play. Epic Mickey came out last month, so my Nintendo Wii is just begging to be played. I would love to finish up Blue Dragon on the 360, but my early unit is exhibiting some of the notorious defects from which Xbox 360 has made its name, so Shu and pals are going to have to wait.

I have resorted to picking through what I consider to be the proverbial leftovers of my gaming selection. When the Google webapp store was launched last week, I thought that I'd see what browser-based games their infrastructure was supporting. I knew that this meant I'd probably be wading through a sea of super uninteresting casual games, but I took the chance knowing that neither time nor finances were working in my favor. Namco's Knightfall: Death and Taxes caught my eye. It was quick to load, seemed to have decent production value for a webgame, and was apparently free!

This screen cap is more interesting than the actual cutscenes. Yeah, that bad.

Now, you'll have to bear with me. I haven't ever owned an iOS device, so Knightfall was completely foreign to me. Reading up on the puzzler, I guess it was released for the iPhone at some point, and it sounds like it is another iteration within the Knightfall series, although I can't finding information on its counterparts. Knightfall: Death and Taxes is a matching puzzler disguised as a roleplaying game. The player is afforded two characters between which they may choose: the Knight and the Princess. Following some yawn inducing 2D animatics (some kind of pseudo libertarian jargon about the taxes and thieves to which the two protagonists have lost their fortune), the Knight and Princess decide to split up in order to reclaim that which is rightfully theirs. Honestly, I clicked through all of the dialog because it was long winded and boring.

Some guy at a cabin telling me how bored I am.

After the goofy opening 'custscenes,' I was plopped cluelessly on a map. I was growing impatient. It looked a lot like the maps from the Final Fantasy Tactics series: numerous locations (battles, towns, shops) dotted across its vista, connected by predetermined paths. Unsure as to why the game hadn't instead tried to hook me with some real gameplay, I clicked on the nearest location on the map, half decided that I would quit the game if I caught anymore bullshit. When I got into puzzling, however, I was unprepared for how much fun I had.

The puzzle grid -- although, I guess the game automatically pauses whenever it isn't the front window. Good to know.

Like most matching puzzlers, this game gives you a grid of color-coded tiles within which your characters, the Knight or the Princess, is placed. You are also joined by enemies, loot, items and special tiles. When a tile is removed everything above that tile in the same column shifts downward, and the player can rotate the grid in order to cause tiles, items, characters and enemies to fall into advantageous positions. As per typical matching puzzle gameplay, like-colored tiles with adjacent edges to that which is removed will also disappear. When all is said and done, most stages are completed by collecting a key and exiting the grid through a door, sort of like the old Gauntlet games from NES.

The Princess and her propeller-leaf-weapon.. thing.

I mentioned that Knightfall: Death and Taxes is a matching puzzler disguised as a roleplaying game, and here's why: When the player enters a stage with your character, they are allotted a certain amount of action points (AP) and hit points (HP), which are depleted between clearing tiles from the grid and taking damage from enemies. Therefore, the player has a finite amount of moves to achieve a given stage's goal. Additionally, experience points, gold, items and equipment are accrued and used in the typical roleplaying game fashion, meaning the player's characters level up and improve throughout gameplay.

Items can be sold at various stores plotted on the overworld map.

Yeah, as I type this, I do realize how two-dimensional this all sounds. But the RPG elements (forgive me for using the phrase so liberally) really do make the game something else. While the narrative is rubbish, all of the little side bits throughout the game propel Knightfall: Death and Taxes beyond the typical matching puzzler that just throws more colors at a progressively faster rate.

One thing REALLY irked me, though. I cleared the first map, and was about ready to make my way into some unexplored territory -- when the game prompted me to BUY A FULL VERSION. A demo? Really? I had no clue. Okay, being rational, I suppose it was too good to be true. And with a $6.99 USD price tag, purchasing the game didn't seem like an unreasonable idea. But when I forked out the cash to purchase the game, my browser prompted me to download an executable file. Why? I was completely satisfied playing the game in my browser. And furthermore, being that it was a .exe, that meant I couldn't play it natively on my Linux box (and that OSX users would be similarly out of luck)! I even tried plugging the game in through Wine. No go.

The map with yet another hideous "pause" UI draped over it.

So that was a bummer. But if this speaks in favor of the game to any degree, I'm still playing it, just in my Windows 7 environment. A bit of a pain, one which I could have done without paying for. But I guess I've learned my lesson.

Anyhow, try the demo out on PC or iPhone, and see if it's worth your buck to play through the full version. I will warn you, however, that the iPhone version is apparently stripped down compared to its PC counterpart, as the latter apparently contains four extra game modes I've yet to explore. Relevant links below!

Knightfall: Death and Taxes WebApp (Demo)
Knightfall: Death and Taxes (Download / Purchase)

Since I kind of boned up the screen caps, I'll leave you with some YouTube footage of Knightfall: Death and Taxes gameplay.:

Check the demo out and comment below or hit up our Facebook, let us know what you think!