Knock-Knock

The goal of the game is to help the protagonist stay in the house until dawn. This can be achieved by going around all the rooms of the house and turning on the light in them, twisting the lights on the ceiling. Only by turning on the light in the room, you can see and, therefore, interact with objects in it. It can be a clock that allows you to "speed up" the time, places in which you can hide in case of danger, or just interior elements. On the other hand, the more rooms that are lit, the faster guests will appear.

Also, lighting is an indicator that can signal the appearance of a "guest" in the room - it turns off when it appears. In the gameplay the physical health of the hero makes its adjustments - poor memory and eyesight. The latter makes him wait a while after turning on each light in order to make out objects in the room.

The time in the game is arbitrary - it can stop, go forward or roll back depending on the player’s actions.

In the house and around it there is something that causes the tenant's horror and forces the player to look for ways to retreat by selecting various tactics for passing levels. The game is quite uniform at first glance. Levels are divided into two types.

• The levels marked with a “House” icon on the map are relatively calm until a certain point. The essence of the passage is as follows: the hero wakes up in the middle of the night and has to start the “frozen” time with the help of the clock, simultaneously making a round. Access to the forest is also available, where a little girl lives, whose role in the game story unfolds as she progresses. Each such level ends with a return to the house.
• The levels marked with the “Eye” icon are full of dangerous and not very Guests from the forest. The player’s task is to help the hero bring dawn closer, using hours scattered around the house and interacting with the guests. It is here that the hero needs to use shelters. In the same way, you can find a clock and some notes clarifying the history of the Resident.

The plot of the game is full of obscure moments and allows for many different interpretations. In the middle of the forest stands the House. For three generations of Residents, he has served as a laboratory and housing. The last tenant, like his ancestors, is a world scientist. His job is to explore the world and record his observations. Recently, the tenant has noticed that some changes are taking place around him in the familiar environment: noise and rattle are heard, things disappear. And at night, his house is completely filled with Guests - creepy and strange creatures. A resident thinks these are just hallucinations. Later, the hero loses his diary, where all his observations are recorded. Soon the tenant begins to find torn pages from the diary, but claims that he did not write it. During the game, the Resident tells that he was once glad to guests and even prepared dinner for travelers, and also says that he is most afraid of the invisible.

Later, the truth is revealed about the girl who lives in the forest.

The development, according to the creators, began with the fact that at the end of 2011 they received a strange letter from a stranger in the mailbox. It was proposed to create a game based on this letter, but, as the developers of Ice-Pick Lodge say, they receive a lot of similar letters in their mail, but very rarely they offer something worthwhile. Nevertheless, this letter, for reasons unknown even to the developers themselves, interested them. The lestplay.rar archive with nineteen files was attached to the letter. Its contents (excerpts of texts, short audio and video recordings), as well as the style and vocabulary of the letter itself were quite disturbing. The man asked them to finish the game, using those materials from the archive, otherwise they would share the fate of the sender. The author left a lot of room for development, but the developers had to use files from the archive, otherwise everything would be "in vain". After this letter, the mysterious customer no longer made itself felt. It is possible that this story is a PR action of the developers, since no evidence, whether it was the archive itself or the sent letter, was published.

The game experiment met with misunderstanding of many critics. Many publications gave negative reviews due to the monotony and monotony of the gameplay, an unclear plot and the lack of a clear explanation of what is happening in the game. However, the user ratings in total were much higher than the ratings of official publications. The developers themselves explain this by the fact that their games have a certain entry threshold, to which the project is evaluated extremely negatively, but after it the game is given maximum ratings.

• Official site (Russian)
• Knock knock knock wiki