Fallen Knight Review
By Amr (@siegarettes)
- Fallen Knight
- Developers - Fairplay Studios
- Publisher - PQube
- PC, Apple Arcade
Fallen Knight begins contradicting itself from the moment it begins. Equipping you with high speed dashes, air dashes and wall runs, it’s a game that feels most natural when moving fast. Then your stride is immediately broken by the combat–which not only steals away your movement options after the intro stage, but asks you to slow down even more to get them back.
Combat on its own already stumbles, with damage sponge enemies and a lack of hitstun. All of this is made worse by its upgrade system, which essentially penalizes you for engaging in combat, giving you zero experience unless you perform parries that disarm the enemy.
Parrying doesn’t have a dedicated button, and doesn’t fit anywhere into the flow of regular combat. It essentially asks you to stop, wait in front of enemies who would otherwise be easily bypassed, then hit the attack button at some point after the attack is telegraphed and hope you get a parry instead of a normal attack that gets you hurt. Timing isn’t universal or natural. Sometimes you need to attack immediately after the flash, or sometimes you need to wait until the enemy dashes up to you and is visibly inside of your hitbox.
The inconsistency of combat makes it a chore, and often I’d be better off bypassing it altogether. Or I would have been, if bosses didn’t provide such a huge difficulty spike that essentially required you to grind for upgrades. Defeating a boss either requires slogging through battles dragged down by long boss health bars, or attempting an instant kill by intentionally putting yourself in harm’s way to get multiple consecutive parries. The same problems that plague the parry mechanics in regular combat still apply here, making reading the timings a mess.
The basic structure for a fun action game is here, but the upgrade system, instead of enhancing that, removes abilities and makes basic combat tedious in order to force you to engage with it. The balance is completely wrong, and continually breaks any sense of rhythm the game begins to achieve, creating a staccato, start and stop flow.
Fallen Knight continually sabotages its own efforts in order to staple new systems to its core mechanics. It’s a parade of ideas that can’t achieve the promise set on paper.