Out of Port Melbourne’s own Playside Studios comes Kill Knight, one of the most metal games I’ve played this year.
It blends the twitch, ultra-responsive arcade-movement of something like Hades with the pulse-thumping gunplay of Doom, setting it all within an eldritch hellscape made up of five increasingly horrific layers that’ll challenge your will to survive.
The most impressive thing about this isometric-action game is how it adds fold after fold to its surprisingly deep combat systems to create what is an ultimately exciting experience.
As you come to master movement within the game, you’ll begin to understand the importance of remaining within the zen state of the “killstream” while executing enemies with a meaty active-reload mechanic that can, depending on the coup de grace you choose, replenish your heaviest ammos, draw in loot around you like a black hole, or overpower your guns leading to a temporary buff to time-to-kill.
The game is so moreish, and I appreciate that it isn’t necessarily a “roguelite” in the sense that it’s random.
In the layers I’ve played so far, enemy spawns are deliberate and consistent, leading to the learning that’s necessary for success. The first goal is surviving a layer, the next goal is climbing the leaderboards, before ultimately attempting to one-combo a full layer: an eye-watering task and not for the faint-hearted. The game presents you with objectives throughout that, when toppled, unlock new equipment that’d otherwise be gated behind a hefty blood toll, so satisfaction also comes with playing with the loadouts.
The cherry on top of it all is definitely the game’s audiovisual presentation which captures the suffocating sufferance that comes with being a desecrated corpse in an abyss. It mixes lo-fi, minimalist aesthetics of the 90s with dread-soaked brutalism and the soundtrack rocks.
Kill Knight is a tremendous surprise and feels like an appropriate kick-off for a jam-packed October.
Kill Knight releases on October 3 for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S.
