All patched up and ready to go!
After a recent patch, new sections of Behold Studio’s Knights of Pen & Paper became accessible. First, the RPG shop, which previously crashed my phone, is now accessible from the top left menu at all times, and now allows me to buy hilarious nerd decor for my game room. Nerd decor that also provides bonuses, like a Player’s Handbook for a bonus to attacks, or a pizza for increased critical hits. I immediately purchased the retro arcade console, not so much because I was particularly interested in the extra health, but because I’ll never be able to fit a real one in my tiny Brooklyn apartment.
The patch also fixed the enchanter’s shop (accessed via the cauldron icon, in towns that have a shop) now sells magical rings, amulets and potions for adventuring characters. These icons have the cute 8-bit art found throughout the game, and some have silly flavor text as well.
Fixing the enchanter’s shop also really improves the blacksmith’s shop. In my previous playthrough, I could access the blacksmith shop, but not purchase the grindstones required to level the blacksmith (or even tell that these could be purchased from the enchanter as well as found randomly), so after the patch, all the blacksmiths in the land suddenly became a lot more useful.
With a working enchanter’s shop, that money earned from quest rewards now has a purpose beside travel and resurrecting dead characters (I’m looking at you, Hipster Mage, who used to die in battle, all the time, back before it was cool.), I’m interested in taking simple quests, the basic requests to defeat X monsters or collect X items, to make money, instead of plowing through the storyline missions to see what happens next.
What happens next is always awesome, the missions are still fantasy fun and the game text is still hilarious. Unfortunately, it still suffers from either typos or translation errors, which is still disappointing because the layered narrative, with the campy fantasy adventure and the gamers asking for more XP, is one of most delightful parts of this game.
Knights of Pen & Paper still crashed the odd time or two in my hours and hours of playing. But this patch adds aspirational purchases to both the gamer nerd storyline and the campy kingdom, which smooth the challenge curve with power-ups, and bring more to explore and enjoy in this delightful fantasy adventure.
Read the original review here.
