It’s a good month to be a fan of Hollow Knight derivatives. We already had MIO release, but now The Perfect Pencil is here to give us another spin on the modern classic. You’ll find health chunks, use focus to heal and throw projectiles, and update your map in an unusual way, but the general aim of this game is even more different than MIO was. The result is an enjoyable take that can’t quite touch its inspiration due to having worse controls and game feel, plus the annoying over-reliance on bright flashes during narrative sections felt like it was burning holes in my retinas.
The Perfect Pencil is more narrative-focused than Metroidvanias tend to be. You play as John, a small boy who’s been pulled into a strange world by a horned monster after being chased by the White Beast. John lands in the world with no head, only to be given a camera to set atop his shoulders shortly after (which he’ll also use to scan objects and people he comes across.) It’s up to John to unlock the way to fighting the horned monster and to also stop the White Beast for good, but the kicker is that everything here is a metaphor for something tangible. There are tons of NPCs with a lot to say, but the dialogue can grow monotonous after a while due to how some of it is more akin to stream-of-consciousness gibberish.
The game’s art direction is fairly strong and pretty unique, as it takes after impressionist painters. As such, the environments feel really different than what I’ve seen in many other games, such as an underwater area where much of it is made of sponges or a biome with mattresses and pillows everywhere you look. Although a lot of the things you’ll see in the game come across as being “lol, we’re so random” at times, as if random nouns and adjectives were pulled out of a hat. The narrative itself can feel like this, but I do still enjoy the general vibe. The art itself does look a bit on the cheap side, however.
The Perfect Pencil is indeed highly reminiscent of Hollow Knight in terms of general gameplay. You have a single sword swipe, plus you can dash, wall jump, and have something functionally equivalent to a double jump (which has you place a temporary platform in mid-air.) From movement to combat, the game feels somewhat sluggish compared to its inspiration. John is slower than HK‘s Knight, and the controls don’t feel as responsive. One change I especially dislike is that you can only do a pogo attack once per jump, seemingly existing to keep players from spamming it. All that said, the movement and combat are fine.
Landing hits fills up a meter that can be used for healing and projectiles, but you have to hold a button to charge up a healing strike to heal. Hitting an enemy with this will heal one health chunk, but if you miss, you use up the healing charge. It adds an interesting risk-vs-reward component compared to HK. I barely used the projectiles, though, as The Perfect Pencil isn’t a particularly difficult game most of the time.
The combat and platforming can be involved, but they’re rarely all that demanding, save for some of the game’s boss battles, which aren’t always all that great. The final boss, in particular, goes on way, way too long. In fact, the game’s final section almost feels like Return of the King‘s as it just goes on and on and on with fakeout ending after fakeout ending.
One aspect that really sets the game apart is that NPCs often have quests for you to do, often involving finding items. There are also a bunch of puzzles to figure out the combinations to unlock doors, but some of these are quite obtuse. For instance, there’s a particularly tough one that gives you the code right next to its door, and I couldn’t figure it out to save my life. Toward the end of the game, you get a cipher for converting algebraic expressions into codes as well, but I’m not even trying with those. Anyone who enjoys the cryptic questing of the Dark Souls games may really appreciate all of these, though.
Despite technically being a Metroidvania, there really isn’t an abundance of spots where you can backtrack or different places you can go. After you make your way through the sponge area, there are three different paths you can choose to take, which are substantial, but all other parts are mostly linear.
Some of your choices can dictate what ending you get, but most of this is a binary choice later on (and you can’t see both on one playthrough.) You can find five keys throughout the game that can unlock an alternate ending, but this is only 30 seconds long and wasn’t at all worth the effort.
As for the flashes, The Perfect Pencil seems practically obsessed with spamming these during certain cutscenes. One particularly annoying boss battle has a 20-second unskippable intro with multiple flashes, and even the final boss section just spams you with these over and over again at one point. I’m sensitive to flashing lights, and I think this game may have permanently damaged my vision; it’s that bad, especially at the end. This adds nothing and I wish the devs had been more thoughtful when designing the game, even if there is a boilerplate seizure warning at the start.
Enemies drop a currency called baubls, plus you’ll find these in jars, as well as receive them for some quest rewards. Instead of dropping them all on death, on occasion a character will steal them from you and you’ll need to find them hiding in the area to get them back. This is a unique idea, but it means that you’ll just lose everything if you don’t find the culprit. The game’s map system is similarly creative. Instead of it filling in when you rest, you have to break map orbs to fill that area of the map in, but this means that you won’t be able to see where in that area you haven’t been, which is annoying.
There are also no map pins, but the game is really good about marking points of interest on the map without your input. Respawn points are handled more akin to Dark Souls than HK, as you’ll find rest points in trees, which are quite far from one another. Rather than having many of these, you’ll unlock shortcuts back to them. This works fine and I didn’t have much trouble with it, as the level design is quite good. There’s no fast travelling, but you do unlock a special area that connects everything nicely, but depending on the route you take, you may not find it until near the end of the game.
As you explore, you’ll find accessories called Perspectives that you can equip, but all of these carry a penalty. For instance, one might give you extra health in exchange for taking away focus. When you have one of these equipped for a while, they’ll mutate and the penalty will change, which can sometimes make some of them useful. But due to the penalties, I only really ever had one of them equipped. They don’t make that much of a difference, though. Speaking of which, neither do some of the game’s upgrades. One lets you plant a flower that allows you to get more focus back whenever you want. Another resurrects you with just two extra hits by default. It’s only really useful for getting past a single arbitrary section of the game.
I’d say the game took me about 16 hours or so to get through, not counting when I was wandering lost due to how the main path forward required me to break a semi-hidden wall that I had trouble finding. I hate when Metroidvanias do that. There are a lot of secrets and riddles to find here, though, some of which don’t become available until the end of the game, too.
I enjoyed The Perfect Pencil overall, but it’s probably going to be a bit niche due to its linearity, nonsensical-seeming story, and the fact that it simply isn’t nearly as fun to play as the game it mostly apes. But anyone looking for an off-kilter Metroidvania will probably have a good time.
The Perfect Pencil: Unique and interesting in some ways, but derivative in others, The Perfect Pencil is a mostly endearing Metroidvania with more than a touch of the absurd. – Andrew Farrell
