Sometimes I just want to play an epic action-adventure without having to learn a trillion battle systems and customization menus. Back to the simple days of Spyro, Medieval and even the N64 Zelda games. A Knight’s Quest answers all my prayers.
Rusty
The kingdom of Regalia is shaken up when you, Rusty, accidentally stirs up some ancient purple crystal in a cave you were exploring. Once you escape and return back to your town, you are tasked with saving the world. Your initial quest is to find some of the fiercest warriors only told in legends. As you start your quest, you’ll soon discover your own ‘Spirit Powers’ which unlock spectacular abilities within you. As you try to gather a team of ultimate warriors you soon find out they won’t be of much help to you. Luckily with your newfound powers, you’ll be able to fill their shoes alongside some of your closest friends.
Simple but effective
In A Knight’s Quest, you swing a sword, parry with a shield and jump. As you progress through the game you’ll soon harness the powers of Fire, Ice, Wind and Time. Each new power gets used extensively before a new one get’s introduced making the controls super clear, simple but very effective. The focus in A Knight’s Quest is purely on the adventure itself instead of a gimmicky control scheme. As you take on quests and are set out to fulfill them, you’ll come across many tricky platforming areas intertwined with more battle focused areas and great puzzles. This variation gives A Knight’s Quest a true classic action-adventure vibe taking me back to the N64/PS1 era. Of course with an updated feel.
Gradually getting stronger
Probably inspired by the Zelda franchise, A Knight’s Quest has some RPG lite elements. You don’t collect XP and grind your way to an unreckonable force but instead, gain new powers and upgrades to your gear as you progress. This opens up new areas and allows you to fight stronger enemies more or less guiding you towards a doable path instead of throwing you into a world where you have to figure things out by trial and error. This might seem a bit patronizing but actually feels quite liberated in the sense that A Knight’s Quest is just there to have fun. Don’t get me wrong, A Knight’s Quest has challenging parts but overall this game can be played quite casually.
Great Environmental puzzles
The puzzles presented in A Knight’s Quest were my personal favorite part of the game. Ever since the days of Zelda on N64 and the first Tomb Raider, a good environmental puzzle has rubbed me the right way. Puzzles that are seamlessly incorporated into the environment and utilize the given powers in an original way feel so satisfying once solved. A Knight’s Quest is filled with these and is what makes this game stand out from the rest of the pack.
Soundclips on repeat
The graphics in A Knight’s Quest are kept simple and do feel like Zelda: Breath of the Wild on a smaller budget. The environments are effective but do feel rough for today’s standards. As I started getting into the gameplay It didn’t bother me at all but to some purists, this might not be up to their expectations. The thing that did bother me was the very limited pool of sound clips used when Rusty did an action. The same “Uh” and “Oomph” gets repeated over and over again to the point it got really annoying. The background music sometimes masked this but in quieter areas, this got old real fast.
A few bugs
This 30-hour long adventure is a huge project for Sky 9 games who are a company with just 1 programmer and 1 artist. I have to take my hat off for what they accomplished with A Knight’s Quest. The amount of work they put into this game has to be tremendous to pull off such a large scale game. The downside of this is that at the time of this review I still encountered some bugs. At one time the game didn’t trigger the second phase of a boss and another time the game stopped working and quit because of an unknown error. These “day one” problems don’t mean this game is unplayable but a patch will be in order to fix some of the rough edges.
Conclusion
A Knight’s Quest is a great looking game best enjoyed is your going for a casual game session. A well balanced made classic 3D action-adventure is rare to come by these days. If the game gets patched on release I would adjust the score to 8,5/10. As it stands I do recommend it, but only after it gets patched.
