The Knight Witch is a 2D side-scrolling – Metroid-lite – bullet hell – deck-building game by Super Awesome Hyper Dimensional Mega Team (and breathe).
The Knight Witch follows the story of ‘Rayne’ the Knight Witch who was never actually a Knight Witch. Living her life under the surface of the earth in the underground city of ‘Dungeonidas’. Years after the war ended between the Knight Witches and the Golem army, the sky was destroyed, leaving the surface scorched and uninhabitable. The golems reappear inside Dungeonidas and quickly start to attack everyone and everything within. Rayne quickly assembles her spell cards and sets off to help defend her home and family.
The Knight Witch assembles her spells and skills
Gameplay wise The Knight Witch is easy to pick up and play. Rayne flies by default so each room and area is nearly fully explorable from the get-go. Some barriers are impassable until you acquire an item later on during your playthrough. You shoot with R1 and can aim with the right analog stick. Choosing to shoot without aiming will have Rayne auto-aim her shots but with less damage.
In addition to shooting, Rayne can equip and use spells each with its own mana cost. Each spell comes in the form of a card and each card has a number at the top of it to represent its cost. These cards can temporarily switch up your bullet style. These include an area-of-effect attack or a defensive spell. With this, you can switch up spell cards and builds as you play through the game. Mana is easy to regain so spells don’t feel like they need to be hoarded for a boss.
The game keeps you invested throughout with new spells and mechanics and with a casual playthrough it can last you up to 15 hours to complete.
The Knight Witch has some interesting ideas and in its last act can hit some darker and more disturbing concepts. However one of the major downfalls of this game is in its writing and dialogue. From what I can tell, the developers are Spanish and English is not their first language. I can only assume some of this dialogue is just through translation. The nuances of the dialect in this game felt like I was playing a game with a fanfiction script of The Knight Witch. Elderly NPCs use phrases such as “This suuuuckkssss”, there is also an overuse of the word “dude”. Even the main antagonist has a “what do you mean the camera is still rolling?” moment when you are first introduced to them.
Exploration is fine for the most part. You need to invest a couple of hours before you can unlock Rayne’s ability to dash. Throughout the levels, you can find beacons. These beacons can be used to regain health, switch out your spell cards and enter a training room to try out spells with unlimited mana. At first glance, it looks like these will be used to fast travel between points on the map. However, they’re not and I cannot understand the reason why they did not include this feature. Rayne moves slow and it can be a chore to backtrack through areas. The option to get somewhere quickly would have been greatly appreciated. There is also no way to leave markers on the map for areas you want to return to. Some quality-of-life features to help the player enjoy the game that little bit more.
All in all, The Knight Witch is not perfect but it is also not terrible. If you are looking for an easy-to-pick-up-and-play game with a dash of deckbuilding you should give this a bash. Just don’t worry about that dialogue you’ll have to sit through.
These bewitching words were brought to you by Lewis Magee.
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