Playing all Knight long.
Kill Knight has you playing as a reanimated corpse of a once loyal knight. While there isn’t much of a narrative presence across the game or past that simple premise, the focus instead is on providing a series of ever-changing hellscapes as you attempt to carve, slice, and mutilate anything that stands in your way. Where Kill Knight succeeds is when it has you focused on the then and now, gutting abominations left and right, shooting, dodging, and carving through enemy forces, I just wish the font choice didn’t make reading everything such a chore.
Kill Knight has you decimating your foes across five environments. These shift as you push through waves, revealing new enemy types, hazards, and layouts. Each area is hand-crafted, meaning each wave and layout is predetermined. This allows you to memorize patterns and learn the levels instead of resetting your muscle memory upon every outing. It’s something I appreciated quite a bit as it meant I could see my attempts becoming better with each death. A yes, you will die a lot.
Part of Neon White’s charm was the leaderboards, showing you the times of other players and your friends. It drove you to want to shave off a few seconds and look to place higher on the worldwide boards. Kill Knight provides such a feat, allowing you to place your score alongside others. Here, it shows you your score, rank, carnage, time, and difficulty. It also shows you the equipment worn, indicating how far along other players are to achieve such a score in that setting. It’s a lot of information that aids in helping you then tackle each level’s intense challenge.
Kill Knight offers up a few difficulty settings, but not much in the grand scheme of things regarding accessibility. The font is stylish and cool, leaning into the game’s aesthetics almost perfectly. The problem is reading that font, regardless of it being on a monitor or the Steam Deck is brutal, especially on the latter. While the game runs immaculately on Valve’s miracle handheld, it is next to impossible to cleanly read any bit of font present in the game without really focusing on what you are seeing. We reached out to the developer and while there are plans to address this, it is unclear when such an update will be patched into the game.
Kill Knight has a lot to master and yet remains simple enough that you’ll rely on every tool to get the job done. You’ll have a set of dual pistols, which have an active reload bar to trigger, a heavy gun that initially pumps out a shotgun blast provided you have the ammo and a melee slice that grants you said heavy ammo once you have cleaved through your foe. Given that some enemies have armor on, or those you’ll want to dispatch immediately due to their wide-ranging abilities, you’ll want to have heavy ammo at the ready to decimate them as quickly as possible. You have a dash to move away from enemies and it also is used to pass through lasers, which can seriously bite into your health. You’ll also deal more damage the longer your combo meter rages on, and your melee attack can be used to counter powerful attacks. Again, there is a lot here to master. But it is so organically implemented that it never feels overwhelming.
As you progress you’ll unlock new weapons, such as converting that heavy into a gun that fires more like an assault rifle, complete with changing your wrath ability, which on your initial gun, the Rainshot, was a wrath ball that fires in a straight line to the Reclifre which converts them into a swarm of seeking projectiles. While these attacks can certainly prove to be more powerful, working them into your run can disrupt that muscle memory, making you unsure if it will fit into your playstyle immediately. Additional unlocks revolve around your guns, sword, armor, and a item that grants a particular trait such as receiving more points from collecting blood gems to power your abilitiy or reducing your dash’s cooldown.
Healing isn’t as simple as picking up gems, you have to make those happen. As you build up a special meter to fire off said Wrath ball, you can then fire it out, turning your foe into a bloody mess but leaving behind green gems that will patch you back up. Each gem doesn’t provide much health, literally a pixel worth, and that is due to the intent behind that you want to carve through as many enemies as you can with your special instead of just using it on a few dwindling forces.
The gameplay of Kill Knight is your typical twin-stick shooter. It’s fast-paced and the feel of controlling the Knight is incredibly fluid. Despite hazards ranging from an AOE from pillars that spawn up from the ground, to spike traps and rotating grinders, everything is very readable and easy to parse, even in the middle of its chaotic gameplay. Destroying enemies earns you blood gems, which then power your key ability. Once you get the handle of the active reload and learning where in the level the lasers and hazards will appear, and the types of enemies you’ll encounter, it becomes this choreographed dance of hitting the right marks and using every tool at your disposal to get the job done. Each level ends in a climax of blood and brutality, with so many enemies on screen alongside hazards that show up like an uninvited guest.
The levels themselves only really change in the look and color, but follow the game's general idea of shifting its level design around to funnel in waves of enemies and hazards. I do wish each level had unique fodder enemies as encountering the same two types over and over is a bit much, especially as you’ll likely play through each level a dozen times before you see its end, depending on the difficulty you’ve set. Still, when a new enemy is injected into your run, you’ll often study them in seconds to determine their ability, threat level, and how to dispatch them. Granted, there is a 90% chance you can shotgun them two or three times in succession and kill them, it nonetheless is a fun moment to find something new here. While the core game could be beaten in about an hour, getting that good to do such a run relies on the trial and error of learning the game and upgrading your kit. So while the game can be beaten so quickly, it will likely take you 5-6 hours to even get good enough to do so.
Like Mullet Madjack, Kill Knight is a fast-paced indie release that succeeds through its basic premise and series of tools. As an undead Knight, you destroy everything that comes your way while earning new upgrades that make the job that little bit easier. Its level design is very similar across its five environments, and its enemy variety is thin in ways where you might take notice, but the gameplay always shines and makes it a very visceral experience that gets more engaging with every new bloody run.
Developer - Playside Studios Ltd.
Publisher - Playside Studios Ltd. Released - October 2nd, 2024. Available On - Nintendo Switch, PS4/PS5, Xbox One/Series X/S, PC. Rated - (T) - Blood, Violence. Platform Reviewed - PC - Steam / Steam Deck (Not Verified). Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Stellar Blade, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.