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Knights of Pen & Paper: Haunted Fall PC Review

Valve’s digital distribution platform, Steam, has grown so much over the years that the platform is now a gateway for various developers to bring titles to the PC. This is such the case for the increased ports for video games that originally started as iOS titles. One such game was the tongue-in-cheek RPG title Knights of Pen & Paper – a charming game based on the good old fashioned pen and paper RPGs – that was ported  to PC with the +1 Edition, adding new dungeons, treasures, maps and bosses, while also letting players switch out party members at the inn for other heroes.

Knights of Pen & Paper: Haunted Fall, the first expansion for the title, builds on top of the original game by adding a theme based around Halloween and all the spooky critters that populate this yearly horror event. For £3.99, the downloadable content throws in the Witch class, the Otherworld area, Black Forest location and a variety of monsters and items, plus a quest line that evokes the Halloween theme, while keeping players entertained with its smile inducing humour and constant supply of references.

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This new content supplies around two hours of extra gameplay, depending on the player’s attitude on tackling the story quests or every side quest that is included in the quest lines on offer in the new locations. Haunted Falls can be accessed by going through a portal at the top right of the world map once a specific quest in the main game is completed. The first quest is aimed for a team to be around level 20 to successfully begin and make it through to the end of it.

The new class, Witch, can be created at any point in the game. The Witch comes with moves that can sap the health of enemies and give it to team mates, put enemies to sleep with a nightmare spell or support a team member with a shield that defends against magical attacks. It’s a support based class that can help a lot by weakening foes for your knights or wizards to deal the final damaging blows.

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Three new locations are added for this downloadable content. The Other Villager is where you will go to gain most of the new quests. This is the safe town for the otherworld zone, although, you can still get attacked occasionally from story quests that feature some of the 16 new enemies, such as werewolves and vampires. A corn field maze acts as the single floor dungeon, albeit without the children coming to kill you for being an adult, instead, monsters such as killer pumpkin scarecrows, flying skulls and even the elderly with lethal Zimmer frames are out to to KO your party.

Lastly, the Dwarven Mall is the big one, a four level dungeon that is visited multiple times, offering a long journey to the bottom that will no doubt come with deaths unless you’re of high level or have the dungeon’s bad guys’ weaknesses learnt. While these extra areas add a nice presentational difference to the art, the gameplay remains the same, you click to a question marked location, roll the dice to see what happens in the spot, then heal, find treasure or fight before continuing on, with a purpose to find the boss key and get to the boss location. It doesn’t change the gameplay up.

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That’s really the main issue with Haunted Falls – it’s more of the same, but with a different theme. The references to Halloween and other various horror related mediums is nicely done, and the laughs are still here, but you are getting more of the same, which is good or bad depending how you feel about Knights of Pen & Paper. It’s not a lengthy piece of content, but if you already enjoy the game, then this is nice addition bolted on to the campaign that fits within the context of the game to offer up the nasties of horror to throw your virtual dice at.

7 out of 10