Fantastic experiment, must see more
The idea of one-button gameplay is nothing new; it's been around for a while. You've probably just never heard of it, because games that use only one button are REALLY hard to design. Surely in order for a game to be fun you need to require more strategy than just one button, right? Well, thank God Trigger Knight is here to show us how it's done.
The emphasis on the game is not on fighting but on managing your inventory by upgrading items and buying potions and elixirs, but at the same time keeping your resources open by saving money for potential life-savers later on, like the Soul Shrines which reset the time limit. It's appealing because it feels like the game designers have taken the most boring aspect of most RPGs, fixed some of the stuff that made it boring, and then stuck it out there on its own.
You do need to be wary of one or two things the game doesn't tell you. Elixirs and Divine Edges don't stack and you can't have both in your inventory. The game doesn't tell you this, which means that unless you were listening one sentence ago you'd have no idea until you, whizzing by a store, decided to spend gold which you can't get back on one of these items and then found out as you were leaving and the shopkeeper was greedily lining his wallet that the very useful item you had before has been replaced, even if the replacement is the same item! I'm also unsure what the Golden Ticket item does, because I'm usually frantically trying to keep my knight alive and can't take time out to go find a chocolate factory.
So basically this is a game where you guide a little knight running in a straight line by buying them better weapons, better armor, and a few miscellaneous items. You'd think this is... well, the most boring part of RPGs stuck out on its own, but trust me it's actually really well-presented and fun. The graphical style is that odd cartoony look that Maple Story and every other RPG seems to have these days which screams fantasy, but not enough that you wouldn't find the game fun. The music is all one heart-thumping beat, and normally I would complain about games having only one repeating song in their soundtrack, but in this case it works. The game really gives an atmosphere of desperation; it feels a lot like what a quest done by a knight with a quickly diminishing natural life span besting enemies they're well-overpowered by should feel like, and its quick pace does nothing but emphasize this.
In conclusion, this game has some minor issues, but it's great to see developers experimenting in this way and I would love to see more.
