A Knight’s Quest: The Degenerate Review
A Knight’s Quest, the much-anticipated action-adventure collaboration between Toronto’s Sky 9 Studios and London’s Curve Digital, hopes to capture the spirit of the games we’ve grown to love. Channeling puzzles and combat mechanics that would make a Zelda fan feel at home, the game creates an immersive atmosphere set in the Kingdom of Regalia. In the Unreal Engine-powered adventure, players control the main character, Rusty, who is both well-received and genuinely likeable. Sky 9 Studios introduces him as a “kind-hearted adventurer who accidentally starts a chain of events which threaten to destroy his world.” Unlocking spirit powers during the course of the game allows the player the ability to get Rusty through hordes of enemies and closer to his goal of saving the kingdom.
The Good
Visually, A Knight’s Quest is stunning. The creators of the game definitely used the Unreal Engine to its full potential. Textures, depth of field, and ambiance are all very well crafted. The art style is creative and lively without coming off as too cartoonish. I felt immediately immersed in the world and found myself very impressed with the complexity of the different scenes I was presented in the game. Character interactions are witty and genuinely contribute to the sense of immersion into the story. Supporting characters were well-developed and I felt myself caring more about what they contributed to the story than a usual hack-and-slash game. In terms of gameplay mechanics, Rusty’s movements and interactions with the environment are buttery smooth. They feel well-balanced and it shows that a lot of time and thought was taken into each of Rusty’s attacks/defensive postures. The movement is well-optimized and the inclusion of rail sliding and wall running feels natural. The different types of mobility options are also a welcome addition to the game. I was constantly looking for alternative and creative ways to navigate maps to get to various objectives. A Knight’s Quest also seems to have a fair level of difficulty for how far the player has progressed through the game. There were no significant step-ups in difficulty that I felt required grinding lower-level enemies to overcome.
The Bad
Honestly, there are not very many negative things to say about A Knight’s Quest. Rarely, I would run into physics glitches associated with collision-detection via the Unreal Engine that required me to restart the game (stuck just outside a rock / stuck in between shallow and deep water). This only happened twice in about 10 hours of gameplay. There were infrequent slow-downs (likely due to the potato of a PC I was testing the game on) that were not game-breaking in any way. If there was one feature I would add, it would be the ability to save the game outside the autosave feature. Often, I would have to return to the beginning of a map just to go through the entrance to trigger an auto save prior to quitting the game.
Overall
A Knight’s Quest did something for me that I didn’t expect it to do. It created a feeling of nostalgia, as if I was playing a high definition remaster of a game I used to love as a kid even though it’s an entirely new game. I was quickly immersed into the story and environment of the game, and, for the first time in a very long time, I couldn’t put down my controller. Kudos to you Sky 9 and Curve Digital, you put out a polished game with crisp mechanics that tells a captivating story. You’ve awoken the completionist in me and I anticipate that I’ll spend countless hours looking for every secret this game has to offer.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 5
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