Blood Knot Reviews

I wish I could recommend that. The story seems nice enough and the dialogue is decent, but unfortunately I can't give it a thumbs up simply for the fact that the UI is broken. Both the battle and the menu ones. Sometimes when I'm in battle, the UI will bug out making the items names disappear and the HP and damage counters will not rise or fall. That way I can't know what items I have (unless looking through its descriptions) and I can't know how much damage I'm doing to an enemy or how much they're doing to me. Not only that, but when this occurs, after the battle, the items do not show on the menu and the HP bar will always show 100, no matter how much damage I took in the last battle. Worst of all is that the bug won't go away unless I do a soft-reset. I just can't proceed in the game that way, and this bug occurs way too frequently. Alas, until this bug and some others (like enemies can't follow you through cliffs, and they often get stuck in their running animations, etc) is fixed, it's better for you to just stay away from this.

Blood Knot is a very dark RPG set in the Brazilian equivalent of the American Wild West, starring a drover who is being hunted by his former companions for a treasure map he supposedly owns, and his estranged daughter who gets dragged into the whole situation. The story is probably the strong point, though it can be summarized as "almost everyone in this narrative is a huge jerk, or at least has made a huge jerk of themselves in the past and has to confront it now." There's some occasional issues with how it was translated from Portuguese, but they're basically just typos and occasional mangled names - the protagonist changing from Fernand to Ferñao for the occasional line - rather than anything that makes the story hard to understand. Artistically, Blood Knot is definitely one of the more stand-out RPGMaker games I've ever played, with the entire thing being a side-scroller and almost no "normal" RPGMaker assets being used. Unfortunately, that doesn't carry over to the music, which - while I think it's original - is less than a handful of tracks played on repeat over the 5-7 hour length of the game. As a game, however, is mostly where Blood Knot falls a little short. Combat is at least hypothetically interesting, with your two characters Fernand and Valentina having almost entirely different abilities for most of the game, Fernand doing basically all of your attacking and Valentina having all of your support abilities, but with no level-up system and little loot to be had, there's not much reason to get into fights except when they're mandatory. Fights can also be very swingy, especially ones where Fernand is alone, dropping you into a Game Over without much way to avoid it - losing two turns to being in Shock is deadly, and since it can happen off random enemy attacks, even curing it with an item won't necessarily help. It's also got a lot of unskippable text - not that you should skip the story the first time, but if you die in a boss fight, you'll often have to go through a few minutes of cutscenes in order to fight it again. Similarly, the fact the first two of three shops in the game can only be visited once and are unavailable as soon as you leave the shop screen is a notable bit of jank. Still, solid short RPGMaker game, would recommend, especially if you're more into story, and especially Wild West/cowboy stories, than RPG mechanics. It definitely deserves more attention than it seems to have gotten! (Note: Aldorlea is pretty consistently bad about their game descriptions on Steam, and this game could definitely use a content warning for being largely about murder, slavery, racial tensions, et cetera. I said it was a dark game for a reason up top, and if that's not your thing, you should probably be aware.)