The Knightling has a certain undeniable charm. It takes place in a colorful, implausible video game world reminiscent of early-to-mid-2000s action-platformers like Jak 3, where the setting is more like a playground than a basis for nuanced, robust storytelling. In fact, The Knightling feels, at many points, like a long-lost GameCube or PS2-era cult classic, extracted from some old vault of unreleased hidden gems.
The Knightling has moxie: there's clear passion behind the game's charming, wholesome veneer, glaringly apparent through its greatest strengths. But sadly, passion and ingenuity aren't everything, and although The Knightling brought me moments of unbridled joy, it also frustrated and bored me with its more undercooked elements.
At its best, The Knightling makes a case for itself as one of the best open-world indies of the year, but bad combat, an oft-baffling story, tacked-on open-world activities, and a general lack of polish keep it from reaching its full potential. It's enrapturing for the first few hours, but your love affair with the game may not last until the end credits.
The Knightling Offers Good Vibes and Even Better Traversal
Mechanically speaking, locomotion is The Knightling's crown jewel. Movement mechanics, like almost every other facet of the game, are designed around Magnustego, the player's shield and sole combat tool. You can use it as a sled, and a notable lack of friction makes it easy to pick up speed. You can slide around to your heart's content, even on flat surfaces or uphill, provided you have enough momentum. Special credit is due to The Knightling's environment design, which perfectly complements this slip-and-slide traversal sandbox.
Before too long, you'll unlock a glide ability, leading to new movement and exploration opportunities. Navigating from point A to point B is consistently entertaining; perhaps it's by virtue of the game's mechanical simplicity, rather than despite it, that movement works so well. Getting around is easy to learn, fast-paced, forgiving, and rewarding. Without a doubt, The Knightling is at its best when it's presenting the player with platforming challenges, races, or other movement-based objectives.
It helps that The Knightling's world is one you'll want to stay in. As previously mentioned, it's not a setting that feels real by any means - buildings appear purpose-built for the player's unique travel methods, absurd contraptions litter the landscape for the sake of puzzle-solving opportunities, and glowing collectables are scattered far and wide. This dreamlike world design is one of the game's strengths, but it doesn't last.
The Knightling's soundtrack is perhaps the game's most pleasant surprise.
The Knightling Doesn't Stick to Its Bread and Butter
There was a clear intention to make The Knightling a complete, multifaceted action-adventure experience. As such, it has a combat sandbox to go alongside its traversal one, but while traversal is exciting, dynamic, and invigorating, The Knightling's combat comes across as obligatory, laborious, and perfunctory. If the rest of the game is like a party, then combat is like an uninvited guest, forcing its way into conversations and making everyone uncomfortable.
The biggest issue with The Knightling's combat is how it feels moment-to-moment. You can attack enemies with your shield, but these attacks almost always feel too heavy, like you're moving in slow motion. Enemies tend to be much faster than you, and many of them can initiate and complete an attack in the middle of your attack animation, which can make fights awkward and artificially difficult. Such problems are exacerbated by the game's tendency, especially in the third act, to throw numerous quick, high-HP enemies at the player simultaneously.
To make matters worse, The Knightling features an auto-lock-on feature that simply doesn't work. It's all too easy to attack the wrong enemy, or no enemy at all, since the game wrests control from you at regular intervals. It can often feel like you don't get to choose which enemy you target. It's even worse when attempting to use ranged attacks, which feature similarly slippery, unrefined aiming, while also demanding greater precision.
The Knightling would have been better with a manual lock-on feature, akin to what's in the 3D Zelda games or Dark Souls, but that would only fix part of the problem. Ultimately, the failings of the game's combat begin at a more fundamental level. It seems to be narrowly designed around defense, with blocking almost always being the best strategy in a given fight. There's no downside to blocking, no stamina, shield durability, or other resource to monitor, so simply tanking an enemy's attacks and smacking them when they take a break is the pattern that just about every fight follows.
Unsurprisingly, this sort of gameplay is incredibly boring at the best of times, as it rewards passivity. There's a parry mechanic in addition to standard blocking, but the aforementioned sluggishness of the combat makes parrying feel cumbersome and inelegant—the opposite of how such a mechanic should come across.
The player's shield can speak, and will constantly chastise the player for dodging during fights. This is far from The Knightling's biggest combat problem, but it is certainly annoying, and adds insult to injury.
Then there's the narrative, about which there is very little to say. The splendid, lackadaisical atmosphere of the early game, when the protagonist embarks on an unlikely journey to find their mentor, gives way to a more complex fantasy plot that doesn't quite land. Characters act in confusing ways, worldbuilding is implausible, illogical, and contrived, and new, interesting ideas are dropped or undermined shortly after they are introduced. A game like this doesn't need a great story, but The Knightling's writing crosses the line between lackluster and frustrating at several points.
Even with its blemishes and missteps,The Knightling is not bad, or even totally mediocre. Its combat is weak, its story underwhelming at best, and its open-world design is nothing to write home about, but traversal and atmosphere save the day. Indeed,The Knightling is worth recommending on the grounds of its movement abilities and soundtrack alone - it's just the rest of the package that isn't up to snuff.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 74 /100 Critics Rec: 54%
- Released
- August 28, 2025
- ESRB
- Everyone 10+ / Alcohol Reference, Fantasy Violence
- Developer(s)
- Twirlbound
- Publisher(s)
- Saber Interactive
WHERE TO PLAY
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
- Fantastic movement mechanics
- An incredible, diverse score
- Quaint, charming art design
- Awkward, unsatisfying combat
- Nonsensical, ham-fisted writing
- Watered-down open-world elements
The Knightling is currently available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. A Nintendo Switch port was planned, but has since been canceled. The Best War Games was provided a PlayStation 5 download code for this review.