Remember Knack?

I first played Knack inside an at-the-time new flagship Best Buy store near the airport in Portland, Oregon in 2013. They were the first store in my entire metro area to get a demo PS4 kiosk, and I was desperate to try it, so I took a special trip all the way out there in the middle of a weekday like a normal person. Once I got past marveling at the different-yet-somehow-mundane DualShock 4 controller, I fired up the Knack demo and was stuck by how hi-resolution its output was. It immediately delighted me with its overuse of GPU-driven physics particles. Early games for that particular console generation were filled with hundreds of simulated particles, as that was one of the “big new things” at the time. So of course, Knack himself is made of dozens of little cubes and spheres that can bounce around the environment. and enemies blast into bits that cascade around upon defeat. The other thing that impressed me about the Knack demo was the number of times I died over its short run of play. In twenty minutes of checking out the game, I easily failed well over ten times. “This seems hard for a kid’s game,” I mused aloud to an empty Best Buy on a Thursday afternoon. The game re-loads checkpoints instantly thanks to smart memory management and basic scene construction, so death isn’t a huge setback — but it happens all the time. <a href="https://xander51.medium.com/remember-knack-ef5ccc800b3e">Website</a>