KNIGHT SHIFT
16-bit ghosts haunt Dord.
You play as a ghost in this cute sidescrolling adventure, meaning you can fly clear over those pesky gaps that plague the likes of Sonic and Mario. In place of platforming precision, you’ll face tricky block-based puzzles, along with simpler turn-based battles against a variety of bizarre foes.
You’re Midy, a friendly spirit who wants to be a knight. Your quest to achieve this sees you tracking down four primal beasties, before eliminating them in one-on-one combat. Putting its own spin on the turn-based rumbles of your average JRPG, Dord’s streamlined battles have you flinging unconventional items, including peanut butter jars, at the enemy. If you hold the relevant key for long enough, you’ll increase your damage output, however if you keep it down for too long, damage will be halved. It’s a neat idea, but in practice it’s difficult to fail.
As such, there was little to hold my interest during the battles. You could strip them out of Dord and this would still be a fine game, thanks to its likeable characters, and the more engaging puzzles you’ll butt up against now and again.
Dord’s adorable hero doesn’t exactly seem like knight material, but with his aversion to gravity and his seeming tolerance of trial and error, he’s the perfect entity to tackle Legend of Zelda- style block puzzles. These quickly increase in difficulty—a little too sharply, perhaps, given the gentle nature of the rest of the game. Containing exploration, dialogue, battles and puzzling, Dord feels like a SNES RPG. It never finds its own personality, but I can forgive it that given how successfully it echoes the 16-bit games of old.