While some people can tend to really get hung up on how games look, my tendency is to instead be laser-focused on fresh, interesting, and refined gameplay. In the case of Knight’s Night, the 1-bit minimalist looks it sports will absolutely turn some people off out of the gate, but as with other games in this style I’ve actually come to consider the look somewhat charming in its own way. Then again, I remember the days of enjoying games on my OG Gameboy, so by comparison modern titles with this specific style still tend to look better… so as long as they’re decent I’m game.

With Knight’s Night, there’s not all that much to know, aside from the fact that it’s a pretty straightforward and generally unrepentantly simple platformer in the old-school style through and through. Your little knight isn’t terribly capable in any meaningful way, with just a pretty weak jump at his disposal, and your job is to simply make the most of it. While the specifics can change along the course of your journey, you’ll really only concern yourself with a small variety of traps and enemies, and since there’s no particular reward for stomping on monsters there’s actually little incentive to do more than merely skip them. Since health is the game’s most precious and limited commodity overall, taking any chances of damaging yourself seems foolish.

The core of the problem here is that if you’re going to go with a pretty bare bones approach, you really need to make whatever elements are there as great as possible… and this simply fails to do that. Your jump feels a little slow and even at a bit of a low arc as simply feeling the proper timing and distance for jumping over spikes initially struck me as odd. I’m not sure if the issue was just my internal feeling for the timing of the jump, or perhaps the hitbox of the spikes being a bit inflated, but considering I almost never have this problem it was pretty irritating. Another problem is that, despite a relatively short overall runtime, with so much repetition of the same visuals and elements the stage design ended up feeling lackluster. There are certainly some more challenging sections, though I’d argue some of the struggles are related to the game’s mechanics rather than impeccable design, but I can’t say there was any clear and compelling reward to working through them either. Perhaps for some people the challenge itself, and conquering it, is all the motivation they need, but with so many other similar (and arguably better) options out there on the eShop, this simply felt underwhelming.