I have to hand it to the developers of Kill Knight for their choice of title: How can I not want to know more about an arcade shooter called Kill Knight?
It is, as you’d hope and expect, about a knight who kills. It’s fast, violent, and coated in red, not unlike Doom Eternal. Developer PlaySide Studios—who, it should be noted, is still holding onto an NFT MMO project in development—describes the game as an “ultra-responsive arcade-inspired isometric action shooter,” which is a mouthful, but makes it sound like it’s somewhere between Supergiant’s roguelike Hades and the original Helldivers.
The trailer, which debuted at the Triple-I Initiative indie games event today, races through brief shots of a knight shooting rocket launchers and other guns into overwhelming waves of enemies. The battle arenas are carved out of stone and suspended in the red expanse that makes up the “Abyss” where the game takes place. You play as an undead knight whose only goal is to carve their way to “the last angel,” which is exactly the right kind of absurd premise a game called Kill Knight should have.
Kill Knight also has a system called “Kill Power” that makes you faster and deadlier the longer you survive. Given how small the levels look and how many enemy fireballs seem to cover the screen at once, that might be pretty tough. Some of the clips go full bullet hell and there’s no cover to hide behind. PlaySide says there are three difficulty modes, so there’s hope for those of us who are embarrassingly bad at threading the needle between a wall of incoming projectiles.
There are five “layers” to battle through with challenges that earn you new weapons on completion. A “Master Mode” lets you play through all five layers in a row to compete on leaderboards, too. The score chasers will probably have to learn exactly how to utilize abilities like the big bomb in the trailer to efficiently clear out enemy packs.
PlaySide Studios aim to release Kill Knight later this year. You can wishlist it on Steam right now.
