I’ve not played the original Knights of Pen and Paper, so I was unaware of what awaited me as I made my journey into this pixel-art oddity. Knights 2 is a traditional turn-based RPG game that lampoons the even more traditional Dungeons and Dragons. You control a party of high-school kids playing a somewhat unconventional table-top game. Your resident Dungeon Master guides you through the world from the comfort of your table, the landscape ever changing around you as you explore new regions and traverse danger-filled dungeons.

Thankfully for the uninitiated like myself, there doesn’t appear to be any narrative connections between this and the first entry. In this adventure you are battling against the Paper Knight, a fellow table-top player who’s become evil pretty much for the sake of it and decided to change-up the edition of the table-top game you’re playing. He truly is an evil man. From there you assemble your party and sit around a table for the entire length of the game as your friendly Dungeon Master takes you on a quest across a vast fantasy world. Your party can have up to five members of your choosing, all of whom will have differing stats and abilities. Such as a Ninja who uses an array of stealth moves and bleed-inducing projectiles; or a Warrior who can deal high-damage and riposte incoming attacks. All starting classes also contain passive abilities that naturally effect the game, the Hipster class allowing you to access merchant items long before you’re supposed to. How very witty.

Combat is one of the game’s biggest focuses and you’re greeted with a very familiar set of tools to work with. The interface is simple, utilising only the left click button to attack, cast magic, choose targets and access your inventory. Battles do tend to move quickly, working on a random turn-based system similar to the likes of Final Fantasy X. The biggest compliment I can give is that the battles themselves never feel like a chore, which is often a rarity in this genre. The fights are usually broken up with funny dialogue that really helps to characterise your enemies. Or if not’s attempting comedy the game will often throw-curve balls, like the Paper Knight randomly showing up and literally throwing more enemies and hazards at you.

These small touches keep combat interesting, even when you’ve fought the same lowly minions countless times. Some enemies will present a challenge but XP is plentiful and all of a character’s moves can be accessed at any time if you have a skill point to unlock them. Once you find your character’s trump-card move, battles can become little more than casual stops on your quest than life-threatening encounters that truly test your strength. The mage’s chain lightning in particular can become pretty devastating in the early stages, by level nine it was capable of wiping out entire lines of enemies in one hit, which did make progression easy, but it felt a little shallow when I knew that any encounter was a breeze as long as I kept my mana bars full.