Knights of Pen & Paper by Behold Studios came out in 2012 and was popular enough to spawn two sequels with the newest off shoot, Galaxy of Pen & Paper releasing just a short time ago, as well as make the big leap to PC. While these games have made it to the PC, I still feel best playing them on the iPad. They were made for touch and the game works very well there.
The game is, at its core, a turn based RPG adventure with a few interesting twists. The game’s setting is in the imagination of your characters, playing a table top RPG kind of like Dungeons and Dragons. As you play through the game, other than the story and NPC actions, you control both the Game Master and the player. Deciding where to go, and what encounters your party faces. This helps you tweak the difficulty to help the team get through a particularly tough fight. For example, the quest says you need to be 4 of Monster B. You don’t have to fight them all at once. Fight them one at a time, 1 and 2 and 1, 2 and 2 or any other combination of encounters. You do get bonus rewards for fighting more monsters at once, however.
The “real” RPG parts of Knights of Pen & Paper include picking your characters “player type” and class, as well as their equipment and skills. As you level you gain skill points to customize your skills for each class. There is also a crafting system, side quests, hidden quests and other fun to find and fight. The writing in the game is also a lot of fun. There are plenty of references to nerd movie classics as well as other roleplaying games and tabletop tropes all over the place.
The graphics are a colorful retro style that is pretty decent and gives an old-school SNES playing dungeons and dragons in middle school feel to the game that I liked. The Sound and music fit the game, but nothing that would particularly stick with me after the fact.
Overall I like Knights of Pen & Paper quite a bit and put many many hours into exploring its map and trying to get every ounce of goodness from this gem. If you have any interest in a turn based RPG pretending to be a tabletop RPG I would say check it out or, if a space flavor is more your speed, check out the newest game in the line, Galaxy of Pen & Paper.
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