Knock Harder: Useless features an interesting mix of Inception-esque dream logic and survival horror as you kill yourself to escape from the dreams you’re trapped in, whilst making sure that you’re not alrready awake (or you’ll just kill yourself).
Knock Harder: Useless is an early free build of the upcoming Knock Harder which is due for release in April. The game takes place in a world where freaky alien parasites trap their hosts within an Inception-esque multi-level dream. The only way to escape the dream is to die (which you do by shooting yourself), but first you need to figure out if you are actually dreaming – if you shoot yourself when you’re already away then obviously you’ll just die.
To figure out if you’re dreaming you need to explore your surroundings and try to figure out if there is something out of the ordinary that could only be in a dream. These clues can come in many forms, such as the sound your gun makes, your reflection in a mirror or even running into another version of yourself. Some are obvious and some you’ll need to pay close attention to observe, but once you spot something weird you simply shoot yourself.
You have a set amount of time in each dream to figure out if you’re dreaming or not and if you stay too long in the dream then the parasite will eat your brain and you’ll die. The dreams are randomly selected each playthrough and between each one you’ll be able to chat to a friendly leprechaun who gives you some helpful pointers.
It takes a few goes to wrap your head around spotting the various dream indicators (and some of them are pretty inventive), but it’s an excellent concept and it’s very cleverly executed. It’s not often in games that you have to kill yourself to survive and the fact that you’re never too sure if you can trust what you see infuses it with a healthy dose of paranoia. Highly recommended.
Controls: WASD – Movement, Mouse – Look, RMB – Interaction, LMB – Shoot, Q – Shoot Yourself
Available On: Windows
Gameplay Video: Here
Download Knock Harder: Useless Here