Knuckle Sandwich

There’s a specific kind of indie game that only exists because one person refused to be talked out of it. Knuckle Sandwich is that game. Australian solo developer Andy Brophy spent years on it — a period during which the entire indie RPG landscape reorganized itself around Undertale‘s ashes — before shipping it on November 22, 2023 through publisher Dinko.

The premise is deliberately unremarkable. You are a nameless young man who arrives in Bright City, an island paradise with rot under the paint. You take a dead-end job at a diner. You make friends. Then you get pulled into a mess involving a street gang, a cult, and a run of disappearances that the city would very much prefer you stop asking about. It’s a coming-of-age story wearing a crime thriller’s coat, and it swings — hard, sometimes without warning — from deadpan workplace comedy into genuine horror.

What makes it worth attention is the combat. Brophy threw out menu-driven attack rolls entirely. Every encounter is built around a bespoke minigame, and there are over a hundred of them: rhythm sections, shoot-‘em-up segments, memory puzzles, timing gauntlets, and one-offs strange enough that describing them spoils them. No two fights play the same way. That is the pitch, the achievement, and — as we’ll get to — the problem.

Market position is a curious thing here. Critics landed it at 70 on Metacritic — a middling mark for a game this ambitious. That number isn’t noise. It’s the whole review.

• 100+ Bespoke Combat Minigames: Every enemy encounter is its own micro-game rather than a stat check. The variety is genuinely without peer in the genre — the closest reference point is WarioWare wearing an RPG’s skin.
• Hand-Drawn Bright City: A dense, explorable pixel-art city of shops, apartments, arcades, and back alleys, packed with visual gags and incidental detail. Save points are washing machines. That tells you most of what you need to know about the game’s sense of humor.
• Tonal Whiplash as Design: A script that runs deadpan service-industry comedy into cult horror without a seatbelt, backed by a large original soundtrack from multiple composers.
• Recruitable Party Members: Companions join your party as the story progresses, each altering how encounters resolve.
• A Built-In Skip Function: You can bypass minigames. Hold that thought.

The Gameplay Loop

The loop is classic JRPG scaffolding: explore, talk, trigger encounter, resolve encounter, progress. Brophy’s intervention happens entirely at that fourth step, and it’s radical. In a conventional turn-based RPG, combat is an arithmetic negotiation — you’re checking numbers against numbers, and the skill expressed is planning. In Knuckle Sandwich, combat is an execution test. You’re not choosing the right attack; you’re performing one, live, under a timer, in a rule-set you may have learned nine seconds ago.

On paper, that’s electric. A fight opens, the screen reconfigures into something new, and the design promises that jolt of what is this that most RPGs stopped delivering long before the credits. Destructoid nailed the shape of it: the game is at its best “when it goes off-script.” The one-off encounters — the ones that abandon their own template — are the best argument for the whole enterprise.

Where the Design Fights Itself

Now the arithmetic Brophy couldn’t escape. A hundred-plus minigames across a full-length RPG means the majority of them must recur, and recurrence is exactly what a novelty mechanic cannot survive. A rhythm section that dazzles the first time is a chore the fifth. Worse, the difficulty is uneven in a way that stat-based combat structurally prevents: in a normal RPG, being underleveled is a solvable problem, and you go grind. Here, if your hands can’t hit the timing window, no amount of preparation moves you forward. The failure state has no ramp. Edge’s verdict — “too erratic for its own good” — is harsh but hard to argue with, and the frustration compounds because these fights interrupt a story you actively want to keep reading.

Which brings us to the skip button. Knuckle Sandwich ships with a feature that lets you bypass its combat, and Softpedia’s advice was to use it liberally. Read that again. The game’s central innovation — the thing years went into, the thing every piece of coverage leads with — comes with a built-in escape hatch, and the recommended play pattern from at least one outlet is to take it.

Two readings are both defensible. The generous one: this is mature accessibility design. Brophy built a story-forward game, recognized that execution-gated combat locks out players with different reflexes or motor abilities, and shipped the ramp. That’s good practice, and more games should do it. The skeptical one: a skip button is also what you build when the encounters are a wall between the player and the good part, and the redesign budget for a hundred of them has run out.

The truth is probably both, and the design is honest about the tension in a way that earns respect even as it frustrates. But the consequence is real: an RPG whose combat is optional is an RPG that has quietly reclassified itself as an adventure game with obstacles. Played that way, it’s terrific. Played as designed, it grinds.

The Writing Carries It

Here’s why the game still finds devoted fans despite the middling critical reception: the non-combat game is superb. The comedy is specific and observational rather than referential — this is workplace humor written by someone who has actually worked a bad job, not a compilation of memes. The horror turn works because the comedy earned enough goodwill to make the betrayal sting. Press Start Australia’s line that it “revives a lost genre” is overheated, but the instinct behind it is right: this is a game with a voice, and voice is the scarcest resource in the genre.

The EarthBound comparison is unavoidable and Brophy has pushed back on it, saying it wasn’t a direct influence. Take him at his word. The lineage that actually matters here is WarioWare — the belief that a five-second idea, executed cleanly, is worth more than a fifty-hour system.

The pixel art is the least contested thing about this game, and rightly so. It’s dense and expressive in a way that rejects the current indie fashion for clean, legible, tasteful sprite work. Bright City is cluttered on purpose. Backgrounds carry jokes. Character animation has more frames than the budget should have allowed. The composite effect is a place that feels lived-in and slightly unwell, which is precisely the tone the story needs.

The soundtrack is the co-lead. Bringing in multiple composers for a solo-developed game is a risk — it usually produces a compilation rather than a score — but the range works here, because the game itself has no consistent register to violate. A tonal grab-bag deserves a musical one.

Technically, a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, so raw performance is unlikely to be the sticking point. The performance question that actually matters isn’t frame rate — it’s input latency, because a game where a hundred minigames hinge on timing windows lives or dies on how tight the response feels. That’s a design-and-engine question more than a hardware one, and it’s the axis on which individual encounters succeed or fail.

The UI deserves one criticism: with every fight reinventing its own rules, the game is perpetually teaching. Some encounters onboard you elegantly. Others drop you in and let you lose a round figuring out the verb. Inconsistent tutorialization is the hidden tax on a hundred-minigame design, and it’s paid in deaths that feel unearned.

This is a Steam exclusive on Windows and macOS, with no console or handheld release at launch — a significant omission for a game this well-suited to short sessions. Bright City is built out of small, self-contained encounters. That’s handheld design. It shipped desk-bound anyway.

Input method is the live question. A rhythm section and a shoot-‘em-up segment want opposite things from your hands, and a game containing both will inevitably favor one device over the other depending on the encounter. The strong recommendation is a controller for the action-heavy fights and a willingness to switch — and on macOS, the input path matters, because wireless connections can add latency that a tight timing window will not forgive.

Knuckle Sandwich is more interesting than it is enjoyable, and that is higher praise than it sounds — but it’s also the reason the recommendation is a hard one. Most RPGs are enjoyable. Almost none are interesting. Brophy built a hundred small games inside a big one, and the hit rate would impress at any studio — but a hit rate is not the same as a sustained experience, and the misses land at the exact moments the game asks for your hands.

The middling critical reception and the game’s devoted following aren’t in conflict — they’re measuring different things. Critics graded the design, and the design has a hole in the middle where a sustainable combat system should be. Players graded the experience, and the experience is funny, strange, gorgeous, and unlike anything else on the platform. Both readings are correct.

We can’t recommend it for most people. For the right player — reflexes intact, patience for uneven fights, skip button within reach — it’s a fascinating, flawed thing worth the $19.99. Buy it, play it on a controller, and use the skip button the moment a fight stops being fun. The game gave you that option. It knew.