Sometimes, a game's just meant to be fun. It's not meant to be a big social commentary or give you Deep Troubling Thoughts, it's just supposed to be fun. I like to imagine the developers of "The Adventures of Sir Kicksalot" were a large team, and the CEO, sat at the head of this big, long table, slapped it with both hands, rose to his feet and yelled, "NO! MAKE IT EVEN MORE FUN!" And the other C-suite jerks meekly complied, because the CEO would not be denied. This game remembers "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic" (DM) and I do too. DM was a bold game, in a sense, an adventure game where you fought or snuck your way through a bunch of levels, using magic or melee or stealth or archery or whatever. But in all cases, you had a kick move, that kick move would knock enemies back, and there was always a convenient set of instant-death wallspikes you could kick guys into. I mean, yes, you *could* try to swordfight them. Or just kick them. WHAP! INTO THE SPIKES! And reviews of DM just focussed on how kicking was the solution to everything. It really was, even my magic playthrough resorted to kickin'. Sir Kicksalot is much like that. You've got all these skills, stealth or melee or magic-based, and you can use them. But you can also kick guys into spikes, and there's usually convenient spikes somewhere. Except you don't kick them nearly as far, it costs stamina, so it's not a foolproof situation here. Sir Kicksalot makes you work for your kills. Heck, most of the time you don't even need to kill guys, there's no XP, so you're doing it for the sheer psychopathic joy. There's a level that will punish you for being murderous, even. (It's not a spoiler, you won't know until it's too late.) And, well, the protagonist is not a very nice guy anyway, so it tracks. Or at least *my* protagonist is not a very nice guy. If there's a murder to be done, I'm doing it. The game's levels are laid out with big, chonky voxels, Minecraft scale. The characters are simply textured, low poly, but quite expressive, the game's textures are fairly basic, but it does the job and it does mean the enemy pathfinding is pretty good as it's fairly easy to tackle on a code basis. So the enemies can make you work, they do more than they might in many other, similar games. And yet, they also have Typical NPC Stupidity. It also borrows from original Bungie, where you can impress people with your enemy logic by having them announce what they're doing as they do it. In this case, with speech bubbles you can see through walls. The game willingly embraces certain game tropes, sometimes just for the fun of it. They'll mill around looking for you, get bored, go back to where they were (the classic Skyrim, "Must have been the rats again,"). If enemies are trying to get to you, and the only way is by a ladder, well, they'll do it! Yes, it's stupid to do so, but if an enemy has no ranged option, they're not going to wait for you. If you're close enough they'll wait just high enough so you can punt them in the face. (They may also take a swipe at you but that's another matter.) You can get skills that start combining into hilarious ways that can break the game a bit: I have a footsweep, a stealth-grapple and a grapple-downed-enemies, and I've had a few fights break into a weird brawl where I trip a dude, pick him up, and throw him at his allies (and with luck, hopefully into spikes too). The game cheerfully embraces wacky emergent gameplay if you want it to; I have lured enemies into a fish trap to get them to slip and fall, and then kicked them off a cliff. I have severed limbs from enemies and then gone full Beowulf, and there's sometimes it's satisfying to find a severed head and just huck it at some enemy's face. You know, this makes me sound a bit psycho, I just realized. Ah well. One of the more charming things, to me, is the game's voice. There's one. One voice actor. Enemies just do a matter-of-fact "blablabla" if they see you, as an alarm call. Or a "blblblblblbl" thing, tongue flubbing against the lips sound, if they fetch up in the water (water or lava is an instant-kill drowning). A shrieky-raspy "Aaaah!" if a thrown enemy will take damage on landing. Limbs flailingly awkwardly in weirdly-animated panic. Skills in the game are done by having you find hidden skillbooks which grant you a skill point, and there's a few on each level, and there's also hidden bits of lore. The game will tell you how many there are, even, so you don't need to worry about missing any, and if you do, you can just replay any level at any time, with a handy tool to help you find the secrets a bit more readily (with spangles at key locations). It wants you to find the things! It doesn't want to punish you overmuch. This is a game that respects the player, I tell you what. Now, the lore in the game bites on pop culture and is irreverent: comparisons between a zombie plague and COVID, the cult of the Fourth Wall that's sort of buddhist (and reveres an all-evil Developer), a communist goblin manifesto, a princess that evaded death because she used a save game. I think you get the point. It's not serious. But there's actual thoughts towards gameplay as well: there's the Morrowind-grade gimmick of directional attacks, where one might thrust, swing or chop with a weapon, and different damage or effects depending. And it becomes relevant, as this is the first game I remember that will punish you for wild swings that would hit a wall. So if you're stuck in a low tunnel, an overhead chop just smacks the ceiling and does nothing else, for instance. If you've fetched up against a bunch of po-faced, super-grim games and need a change of pace, here, this is it. It can actually be challenging, depending on your chosen style, and you can be a stealth archer if you want. Heck, there's a skill for shooting enemies in the knee. (And a snide reference to how this turns adventurers into city guards in the skill text.) If you kind of actually liked playing Dark Messiah, this is, on the whole, a superior product, and it doesn't have the ridiculous plot too. And in the main, enemies will kick you back. Unless you cut their legs off out of pique. You totally can. You could Black Knight a guy if you really wanted to. That's a reason right there to get this game. Obligatory reference to my curator and twitch nonsense here. Check out my profile. I don't do content, I do fun, and, ah, I crave an audience. If you're down here, you're my kind of person. Do you know how few people actually read these days?