The Knightling

The Knightling was provided by Saber Interactive for review. Thank you!

In a time when everything is about survival crafters, roguelikes, or huge open-world sandboxes, it can be nice to go back to the late 1990s, when more focused action-adventure platformers were king. The Knightling really feels like a bridge between the classic 90s formula and a more modern take on the format.

The Knightling puts you in control of, well, the Knightling. The game's prologue places you on an adventure with your mentor, Sir Lionstone, who abruptly goes missing. Now you must step into his shoes with his trusty (and possibly sentient) shield at your hand to help the residents of Clesseia and find out what has happened to Sir Lionstone himself!

The Knightling ticks all the boxes for a fun adventure, with light-hearted dialogue, plenty of puzzles, a decent combat system, and a weird sense of nostalgia. While the game is an open world, it isn't massive. It's more of a similar scale to 1990s platformers, but if all the levels were interconnected, instead of separated by loading screens. There are plenty of side quests, but there isn't an overwhelming checklist of things to do like in a Ubisoft game or a large-scale RPG.

That being said, the game has some Ubisoft-like elements, such as finding "Cartographer Lookouts" to unveil the map. But it's on a smaller scale than your average open-world game, and doesn't feel like a laborious checklist of things to do. In a way, it reminds me a lot of a Legend of Zelda experience.

While there is this main questline to pursue, the game is non-linear, so you can head off and explore, or, as I mentioned, do the plentiful sidequests to help the residents of Clesseia with their day-to-day problems if you want a break from the storyline.

The brightly colored, saturated world and cartoon-style enemies all add to the game's light-hearted aesthetic. None of the dialogue is voiced, but it does aim to be humorous and carefree and pulls it off without being cringe-inducing. You just might hear the city residents complain about kids a lot; no one seems to like children here.

The combat, however, is a little more on the difficult side, which is why I wouldn't say this game is designed for "kids". While not a "souls-like" game, The Knightling heavily features parrying and dodging mechanics, and you will need to learn them to succeed. Some enemies take almost no damage unless their stamina is depleted, and the best way to do that is through successive hits and parrying.

It's not as enjoyable as most soulslike games, but there is a degree of satisfaction when you face an enemy, pull off multiple parries, and whittle that health bar down with combos.

The upgrade system is fairly simple, and there aren't many upgrades, but it does aid the sense of progression. You can earn many upgrades simply by exploring the map, rather than having them locked behind storyline progression. It is great for someone like me who enjoys exploring over just barreling through a storyline.

I encountered a couple of issues during my time with The Knightling. Unfortunately, both of them were quite frustrating. One was a tooltip that stuck on my screen forever, even when exiting and restarting the game, preventing other, more relevant tooltips from appearing, making it difficult to know how to proceed. Secondly, some objectives are just overly vague, or in some cases, don't spawn the required NPCs. The game gives you a task, leaving you with little information on how to accomplish that task. This wasn't helped by the aforementioned issue of being unable to learn new gameplay mechanics due to the bugged tooltip.

The Knightling - Steam Deck Performance

The Knightling has great controller support and supports 16:10 resolutions, so we get a nice full screen with no black borders. The game even has UI scaling that can go up to 125%, which I recommend for the Steam Deck, as some text becomes difficult to read at 100%.

Unfortunately, performance is a bit of an issue with The Knightling, and oddly enough, the game is CPU-bound rather than GPU-bound. This does have the advantage of us being able to bump up the graphical settings a little and having some nice shadows and textures, but depending on the area, we can struggle to maintain 30 FPS. You can see the exact settings I used in the images below; you can click to enlarge them.

Using these settings, in combat areas and the vast majority of the game, we can maintain 30 FPS and have a playable experience, even if we do drop frames here and there with some stutters. The town area taxes the CPU quite a lot, so expect some drops to the mid-20s in that area.

The power draw of the game varies a lot depending on the area, with around 18-20W in the city, about 15-17W in rural areas, and as low as 10-12W when in dungeons. I would estimate battery life at around 3-3.5 hours on a Steam Deck OLED and around 2-2.5 hours on an LCD model. Temperatures were around 70C-80C outside, dropping below 70C in dungeons.

Accessibility:

The Knightling does have difficulty options and the option to make the player character immortal. UI scaling affects all UI, including subtitles/dialogue.

Conclusion:

The Knightling is a game that fills me with nostalgia for the platforms and adventure games of the 1990s. It's got some rough edges here and there, but despite those issues, it's a really good time. The movement and combat feel nice and smooth, there's a decent amount of content, and the world is interesting. It's a game to check out if you enjoy platformers and feel nostalgia about the good ol' days. It's possibly the closest I've seen to a 3D Zelda game on PC.

Steam Deck performance is a little disappointing; the inability to hold a constant 30 FPS is a shame, especially when it feels like the main reason you can't is because of non-essential background NPCs and their pathfinding. However, in most combat areas and away from the city, the game tends to hold at 30 FPS, making it a playable experience.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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