Good Night, Knight looks like one thing, and plays like something completely different. On its face, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Surprise can be a good thing. Indeed, the fundamental surprise of Good Night, Knight‘s gameplay mechanics was a delight to discover. That said, surprises aren’t inherently good, and this game was hiding one giant one for me that soured me on the experience overall.
“How does it go again?”
Good Night, Knight is a dungeon-crawling adventure game with roguelike elements. Which is to say, story isn’t the most important element here. You are a ‘Holy Diver’, a heroic knight. And as the game begins, you are falling to your death from a massive tower, having just saved the land from certain destruction. Instead, however, you crash at the base of the tower on a piece of rubble, seemingly alive and unharmed. From there, you re-enter the spire, seeking to… do… something. What is unclear, for reasons we’ll get into later.
There are plenty of games that have managed to overcome limited story aspects, as I’ve discussed on here often. I don’t think a video game needs a particularly robust narrative. Instead, many games thrive on pure experience. Good Night, Knight‘s particular blend of genres lets it do so for some time. It’s rare for a game to play with disempowering the player, but this one does so in such a way that the grind becomes memorable, its repetition addicting and fascinating.
For awhile.
“The evil was banished.”
Right away, you may notice that Good Night, Knight looks a bit like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Given that you are a knight with a sword and a shield, you may be tempted to play it as you might play Zelda.
Do not do this. You will die. A lot.
This is because Good Night, Knight is a stealth game. Initially, I was trying to figure out why the game ‘aimed’ your sword with a separate stick from your movement. It felt clunky. This is because you aren’t aiming the sword — you’re aiming your cone of vision. In most stealth games, your enemies have a cone of vision, while you have an omniscient view of the battlefield. In this, you are the one with the cone. There is no minimap tracking your foes. You can see things straight in front of you, hear heavier enemies that are nearby — and that’s it. You want to take out enemies quickly and quietly, before they alert nearby foes, because if you ever find yourself fighting more than two enemies at once, you’re just dead.
And when you die, you wake up back at camp. You have to spend food, provisions, and supplies — three different kinds of resources you find in the tower — each time you die. Food refills your health. Provisions refill your item charges. Supplies refill your potions. Unlike most games, you’ll desperately need your items to safely progress, so you want to make sure you are well-stocked at all times.
Thankfully, you don’t have to start from the beginning every time. Every 2-4 floors, you encounter an elevator. Fix it, and that becomes a new checkpoint you can always return to. You can use those to rest, recovering your health and tools and a cheaper cost. Then you get back to it, sneaking around in a very un-knight-like manner.
“The Princess, rescued.”
It’s clear from the gorgeous pixel art that Link’s Awakening is an influence. Anything with this style that finds you crawling through dungeons is going to draw that comparison. But Good Night, Knight draws influences from elsewhere, and its strengths lie in the unique combination of elements that go into its basic gameplay loop. The first, discussed above, is something like Assassin’s Creed or any of the other big stealth games. Stealth is an enormous part of this game, and it is handled really well.
By limiting your field of vision, you are inherently putting the player in a weakened position. In Assassin’s Creed or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, you can see everything around you. It is incredibly difficult for enemies to sneak up on you. You are always in a position of power relative to everyone around you. The structural appeal of those games, generally speaking, is control. They let you control the map.
But here, the map controls you. It’s a fitting inversion for the roguelike genre, where an ever-changing map dictates so much of your play experience. Roguelikes purposely hamper players by putting you at the mercy of random enemy placements with unexpected rewards. What if it took it a step farther, and made the map itself part of the game’s hostile architecture?
Of course, that would grow frustrating fast without some way to get stronger. Because this is technically a roguelite, a game in which you unlock permanent upgrades that carry over from run to run, you do get stronger as you play. How is another interesting inversion.
Killing monsters gives you experience, making you more comfortable with your experience. You have a weight limit, and each piece of equipment weighs something. But as you kill monsters with it equipped, it weighs less and less. That new and improved shield will weigh you down considerably when you first equip it, but as you familiarize yourself with it, you’ll notice the weight less and less. That’s good, because you want to equip a bunch of stuff — knives that make harvesting materials easier, a helmet that let you see around corners better, boots that let you jump more quietly. But where do you get those things?
Well… you hunt. That’s the other innovation: The game pulls from Monster Hunter in a way I didn’t expect at all. You can kill a monster and just get experience, but you have special kinds of attacks you can do on unsuspecting monsters. These methods harvest the beasts for special, singular items you can only get from them. And you use those items to barter for better equipment. It’s a neat system that pushes you to find new ways to approach problems.
“The land is at peace.”
So look, I love a lot about this game. It’s a fascinating combination of elements that tries new things and finds fresh ways to approach old mechanics.
This is the first game I am reviewing on here without completing it. At first, I thought this might be because Good Night, Knight is unpardonably hard and so goddamn long it actively undermines its own storytelling. Let me explain.
So, the first area of Good Night, Knight is known as ‘Bedrock’. There are, I think, 14 floors, which includes two ‘story’ floors, five elevators, and one boss. The enemies are diverse and interesting, presenting simple challenges intended to teach you the mechanics. All good so far.
The second area is ‘Vivarium,’ a plant-and-jungle themed area. I have currently unlocked seventeen elevators. I am on floor fifty-one. In that time, I beat one boss, and encountered no NPCs. At first, Vivarium is exciting. The updated enemies, about a half-dozen new ones, move differently and have more complex attack and movement patterns. The level introduces traps in the form of flowers that will eat you and spit you out elsewhere in the room. Water, which prevents you from using items, becomes more common. It’s a good challenge.
Fifty floors later, however, fighting the same small group of enemies in the same small pool of randomized room tiles… let’s just say, the shine wears off. At twenty floors, this is a good challenge that pushes you to start engaging seriously with more diverse mechanics. At fifty+ floors, it’s just a slog.
Surely this is unintended. Is this a metaphor? Did I miss an exit? Or… is Good Night, Knight literally unfinished?
“The adventure is over.”
And there’s the rub: If you look on PC, you’ll see that Good Night, Knight is, quite literally, unfinished. It’s in early access. It will be in early access for another year, in all likelihood. But if you look in the Nintendo eShop, there’s no notice that the game is a work in progress. This is because Nintendo typically doesn’t allow Early Access games on its platforms.
The unique combination of elements at play in Good Night, Knight makes it worth checking out if it sounds intriguing. A stealth-based Zelda-like Monster Hunter roguelike is… well, it’s like nothing else I’ve ever played. But between some badly balanced levels, the overwhelming numbers of foes in the later ones, the frequency of game-crashing bugs, and the genuinely staggering length of the grind in its current form… this might be one you want to wait on.
I imagine that, at some point, Good Night, Knight will become something memorable. But if you’re like me, you don’t expect a literally incomplete game to drop on the Switch, or any console. When the game comes out more fully formed, I may revisit this review. The ideas at play are fascinating, and the game mostly feels quite good. For now, however, let it stand as a warning to Switch players that it is frustratingly incomplete, and likely to remain so for some time to come.