Knight’s Night! – PS5 Review

Knight’s Night! is the latest release from our friends at eastasiasoft, being a lovely double dip PS4 and PS5 for those who partake in the perceived easy platinum boogie. Us here at PSC, we prefer to judge a game on its own merits, trophies be damned.

At first glance you’ll be forgiven for thinking that Knight’s Night! isn’t much more than a simple platformer. You’d be right to some extent as there’s not a great deal of meat on the bones here. The black and white palette being an apt metaphor there.

Yes, the gameplay is a little perfunctory at the outset plus KN  generally yields trophies like a piñata at a kid’s birthday party. From our point of view it feels like a series of missed opportunities. As you progress, you’ll find collectables (sic) but they have zero bearing on the gameplay. They’re just useless trinkets.

They don’t even link up with the trophies. So a double missed opportunity there. We guess Knight’s Night! was originally an itch.io release, such is the minimalism on display. It’s the sort of thing that Ratalaika churned out when PS4/Vita was the crossbuy route of the day. Heck, Knight’s Night! would be the perfect fit for Vita.

Another missed opportunity then, but that’s more down to Sony abandoning our precious handheld pal than anything else. A Vita 2 if you will Sony thanks. You’ve just got the platinum on Balatro Cerny, so sort it out.

Unlike your typical eastasiasoft release though, the challenge does actually ramp up somewhat with Knight’s Night! upping the ante regards the gauntlets you have to negotiate. At first it is basic enough with just spikes to avoid. As you progress the obstacles increases to falling blocks and springs to jump over spike pits.

Plus you’ll also unlock extra abilities on occasion in a sorta metroidvania way, initially a dash to get past the spikes as well as a handy dandy double jump a while later. There may be extras we’ve yet to see as at the time of writing we’d not managed to finish all twenty-five levels yet.

One thing that we wish was better implemented was the checkpointing. When you find a tent in a level, if you die you’ll restart there. Only in some levels they’re really sparse and you’ll go for ages before you reach one. And then there’ll be loads in a short stretch. The inconsistency is a bit annoying.

In conclusion then, what you might assume to be a rinse from eastasiasoft isn’t quite as easy as you might anticipate. It’s a lot of fun in a nice lo-fi way though.