Knock on the Coffin Lid – Complete Edition Review

Knock on the Coffin Lid is one hell of a title to give your roguelite deckbuilder – not sure it is a great name but it is certainly a memorable one. Originally released last year in August, Xbox players are now experiencing the complete edition this month.

Although it has all the standards of a good deckbuilder (more on that later), KotCL distinguishes itself by pushing its story to the forefront. It is set in a realm of Humans, Elves, Orcs, among others, that has been beset by a demon plague. After the prologue (that follows a different character) the story centres on three protagonists that have been laid to rest, after being murdered. Only two are playable at first – Persival the warrior, and Bjorn the Elf-werewolf – with a third playable later. Both have their own backstories and play styles.

After a long dialogue with Mortis, the person that knocked on their coffin to bring them back to life – the player then takes control and has to decide which route towards the boss of each chapter. On the way they will have story sections that they have to make choices, fight enemies and collect equipment. The aim is to make it all the way to the king Sigismundi and figure out what is going on.

There is beautiful hand-drawn art that has that of a high budget comic book. The panels are brought to life by solid voice acting and give the story more heft.

The standout is the story scenarios, some have upwards of 6 different outcomes, the choices the player makes will have different outcomes on the ending. Maybe Goblins can now push back their Orc oppressors, or the Dwarves might get the upper hand on the Elves. These choices differ depending on the character being played as, for example, drinking some suspicious water as Persival will be different to what happens when Bjorn drinks the same liquid.

This offers a lot of replayability as the map never changes in its layout, so revisiting sections with prior knowledge can help the outcomes. That or, if a run is going poorly, it is an opportunity to try a different route and see what might be going on there.

KotCL also gets a lot of mileage from its RPG influence. The gear collected along the way will not just visibly change their character, it also increases their stats, offers interesting perks, and even adds new cards to the player’s deck. One of the things I really liked was that there were armour and weapon sets, collecting and wearing more items of these sets confers increasing bonuses. The thief set gets more coin collection, the Elf set provides more evasion and so on.

This all ties into the combat very well. Anyone familiar with these games will recognise the process. The player character gets shuffled a hand of attack and defense cards; there is icon above their opponent’s head that indicates what they will do next and the player will play their cards accordingly. There are also a roster of bonus cards that can the tides of combat, and curse cards that bestow debuffs.

The gear often gives straight up buffs like the ability to redirect damage at the enemy, or provide armour – a default amount of defence is cast every round to absorb damage.

Persival is more conventional in here, he has a pool of energy each turn that must be spent to play most cards, his starting deck is about strikes and shields. While Bjorn uses his own health to play cards (generally all of them are strikes) and must flit between his two forms to attack and heal himself.

As expected, too, the final bosses are tough and motivate the player to optimise their runs. Getting that successful end game is where KotCL fell down for me. For all its diversity in the character build and deck setup – I didn’t feel like a lot of these were viable. I always found myself trying to get a lot of defence and then being able to cast weak on my enemies to make sure they couldn’t kill me, given their massive health bars and ability to do tons of damage, all the other tactics felt like a slow grind into death. Too often I didn’t get what I needed and then felt resigned to this being an exploratory run instead of a successful one.

There are also lots of little interaction bugs that I hope they fix now that the game has released. In my review copy there were a litany of screens where I could not interact with anything, or I would need to find the button on my controller that would bring back the cursor.

There was also one design choice that annoyed the hell out of me as I played more runs. When repeat dialogue came up, I wanted to skip it. But pressing the A button speeds up the dialogue rather than skipping it, and when the dialogue ends there isn’t a prompt to go to scenario choices. This meant that very frequently I would accidentally pick a story decision in an attempt to get through some lines that I had already seen 10-11 times before.

That said, KotCL is an ambitious attempt at making a more accessible narrative deckbuilder to rival Griftlands’s crown. I don’t think it is perfect but anyone looking to try something new will be entertained.

Conclusion

Knock on the Coffin Lid is a solid entry in the roguelite deckbuilder category. Anyone sick of the other big contenders will have plenty of things to do. Those looking for a bit more story than usually found will get the most out of it.