Below is a carbon copy of a review I wrote some time ago on the curate forum. As I'm moving all my review here, this one came up here as well. Next week a brand new review will be posted, and sorry for the delay on that one.
Knightin'+
This is a game released on Steam, but with a demo here on Game Jolt. Please note that I only reviewed the demo.
Knighin'+ is a very nice classic adventure game. The entire style really breathes the 'retro' style from the DOS/NES era. The "story line" really makes a joke out of the cliché stories that always come with games like these, and that shows that they didn't take this all too seriously, as you play these games for the game after all, and not really for the story line... At least not THESE kinds of games.
You are Sir Lootalot (a clear pun on Sir Lancelot, from the legend of Camelot and the knights of the round table). You just want riches and fame, and dungeons are always filled with it, so here you are. The gameplay is styled upon the early Zelda games, and is pretty easy to understand. The graphics contribute to the style and the chiptune background music just make that I really feel homesick to those old times.
The game explains itself with pictures on the floor, with the keys on the keyboard you must press. This is very very cool, but I also have a point of critic here. I think the developers blindly assumed I'd have an XBox controller, which I haven't. Mine is a Logitech, and as a result the keys displayed on the floor do not match those on my controller, however I figured it all out pretty quickly, so no true harm done, but still. The controls through my Logitech controller were pretty easy for me to understand, and also pretty logic, as I've seen those before.
Now it's my guess that in the full game, each dungeon will have several floors, with rooms in a 4x3 grid. The map on top of the screen helps you to find your way per floor, which did help me on several occasions, not to get lost. Many floors feature monsters and lock you in until all monsters have been defeated. Monsters do not respawn if you leave the room and come back unless you go from one floor to another. As far as I found out, locking in only happens once, and THAT IS A GOOD THING.
There are also many traps, however you can shield yourself or dash around, which will really be helpful on a quest like this, and it comes down to cleverly use them. I also found some puzzles in which you have to light certain icons and leave some out. Those puzzles are a very clear downside of this game, as there's no logic whatsoever in them, as no clues or anything are given, making it pure guessing work what kind of pattern is expected here. The first puzzle I encountered didn't give that much of possibilities, but a second one 4096 different possibilities (calculated it through.... I love my Lua CLI tool) figures... I don't wanna make that many guesses, sorry.
Now (at least in the demo dungeon) every floored featured a clocked wizard kind of guy selling stuff. You can pay by giving him the gold enemies drop upon dying. This really makes your life easier, and gives you a reason to collect gold.
The boss trashed me all the time... So perhaps I need somebody who can give me a good strategy to properly deal with this.
So overall this game does have a few flaws, but it also hits it were it counts. Providing a challenging retro-style game, and I really recommend to try the demo so you can see if this is the kind of game you wanna buy.
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