Bahnsen Knights, from the two person Argentinian development team LCB Game Studio, is the third in a series of text-based games that the studio have dubbed Pixel Pulps. Following Mothmen 1966 and Varney Lake, the new entry takes on a grimy, 1980s post-apocalyptic aesthetic and sees you operating as an undercover agent who has infiltrated a cult in order to find evidence that could implicate them in the murder of your close friend.
Though Bahnsen Knights is primarily a story game—with a close resemblance to a Choose Your Own Adventure book—it doesn’t have a great story per se. There isn’t much momentum to its narrative or tension in the underlying mystery. Its best and most layered character—a dive bar owner with deep interests in mathematics and, ironically, the craft of writing interesting characters—is a bit of an anomaly. And while the writing has its moments, it’s also clunky at times, not least of which for its tendency to drift off into tangents. Nevertheless, Bahnsen Knights makes up for this with a surprisingly dense and intensely evocative atmosphere.
At the center of the story is the titular cult headed by a former car dealer who found a barnful of Uwe Bahnsen-designed Ford Sierras and took it as a sign (or so he claims). The Bahnsen Knights are predictably senseless and cruel. The cult members emblazon the hoods of their cars with red crosses, “exorcize” roads by speeding toward oncoming traffic, and “feed” their enemies to tornadoes. Those tornadoes are a constant threat in the game’s American heartland, rendering the government useless and conjuring ideas of heavenly judgment. It’s an apocalypse that’s at once so Old Testament and so Americana that you could almost miss its most urgent modern parallel: the ever-accelerating rate of natural disasters brought on by climate change.
The game also gets a lot of mileage out of its crude visual and audio design, evoking retro PC games without relying on nostalgia for their effect. The graphics utilize a highly specific color palette dominated by a clash of fuchsia and scarlet that sits so wrong that it may turn your stomach. And aside from some piercing blue accents, nearly everything else is pitch black, with barn walls and Sierra roofs indistinguishable from the night skies and asphalt that engulf them. The game’s sound, which is mostly made up of brief, droning music loops, is largely subtle and haunting, with tracks often incorporating the hum of road noise and the whine of engines.
But as engaging as Bahnsen Knights’s atmosphere may be, the process of navigating it isn’t as consistently engrossing. The similarities to Choose Your Own Adventure-style storytelling work both in the game’s favor and against it. On one hand, there’s freedom to how you approach many situations, and there’s some excitement to knowing that the game holds more mysteries than you’ll uncover on first playthrough. On the other, there are quite a few fail states that feel arbitrary or unfair, and reloading a dialogue sequence several times in quick succession only serves to break the mood that the game otherwise works so hard to maintain.
This game was reviewed with code provided by Stride PR.
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