The Knight Witch: Review
My favorite discoveries in video games are when a game exceeds the sum of its parts. When you are presented with a bullet-hell metroidvania with collectible card game elements, you assume you know what you’re getting into. Yet Knight Witch still managed to surprise me through it’s gorgeous art direction, uniquely adorable protagonist, and surprisingly rich plot.
In Knight Witch, you play as Rayne, a… knight witch, but not exactly. Prior to the events of the game, a quartet of knight witches fought against a crazy despot and saved the world. At the time, the four knight witches were supposed to be five, but Rayne was too weak and was excised from the group. Now as a new threat looms over the world that the previous knight witches are failing to handle, it’s up to Rayne to take up arms and become the knight witch she was always meant to be.
If everything in the previous paragraph seems fairly standard to you, congratulations, you’ve seen an anime before. What makes Knight Witch stand out, though, is how it tackles these tropes. Rayne’s understandable FOMO is counterbalanced the more she learns about the events of the war. Between the propaganda machine that is necessary to provide the witches with power and the traumatized state of the previous knight witches, it becomes more and more clear that Rayne may have dodged a bullet by missing out on the war.
Fortunately, dodging a bullet is what Rayne does best. Throughout the campaign, you will spend a lot of your time flying through different environments and dodging bullets. The actual combat of the game balances that fine line between hectic and understandable that is necessary for bullet-hell games. Your basic attack can be fired in any direction or locked onto a target for a reduction of damage. Meanwhile, the enemies fire a deluge of missiles and energy orbs that you have to continuously dodge. So far it’s standard bullet-hell fare. What makes it work so well is the tight controls, clear enemy attacks, and a customizable set of special abilities.
There are two ways to customize your experience with Knight Witch. The first is the choice at level-up to increase your physical abilities or your magical abilities. The second is through your deck of special attacks. Throughout the game, you find cards that each have a special move you can cast if you have enough mana. At any given point in time, you can select between three available cards. Once a move has been used, it gets shuffled back into the deck and a new card is drawn to replace it.
I was honestly surprised at how well the customizable deck of cards worked to create a strategic experience. In the beginning, I fully expected to find four or five cards that I would always use (like the hand cannon which can fire through walls and hits in a wide area) and then rarely ever change things up except to test out new cards when I got them. Instead, I often found myself swapping cards out based on the situtation. When I would die in some of the more difficult ambushes, I would look through my deck and think “man, if I had the lightning bolt instead of the daggers, I could take out those overhead turrets during the second stage.”
The only complaint I have with the combat is the addition of elements that serve to make combat more frustrating instead of just more difficult. These include the submarine sections where you can only shoot left or right or the untargettable enemies in a later stage that continuously lock onto you and do damage if you don’t dodge at the right time. In a game where I want to keep feeling like I’m getting stronger, some of these moments had me frustrated with how much weaker I suddenly felt. Though I do admit to feeling a little more overpowered when the submarine section ended and I finally had my dash back.
The metroidvania elements of the game work surprisingly well with a character that can fly. Getting through individual rooms feels less like a chore during back tracking when you can dash past enemies or fly over ledges. It also opens the world up to easier three dimensional movement, as there are no platforms you have to jump on to go up. I did wish the world felt a little more connected, though. Instead of a sprawling map like you would see in most metroidvania games, Knight Witch breaks its maps up into distinct levels. This can make it easier to remember where specific items or secrets are, but also makes the different levels feel like they’re not part of the same world.
My quibbles about the combat and world are fairly minor when compared to my love of the Knight Witch’s charm. Rayne as a protagonist is adorable as she continually works hard to be accepted while not compromising on her morals. Her relationship with her husband, Akai is also perfectly wholesome as he provides a nice balance of emotional support and guidance. Sometimes it’s just nice to see a healthy and loving relationship that doesn’t flatten its characters or kill them off for the sake of character growth. Each of the traumatized knight witches are also awesome in their own ways as each has been affected differently by the horrors they’ve endured.
Knight Witch has an excellent balance of wholesomeness with darkness and this carries over into the sound and world designs. You spend a lot of your time bouncing through beautiful realms that have been devastated by a golem attack while an eerie but soothing melody plays in the background. The light and vibrant color scheme also pairs nicely with the emotionless robots and morbid plot.
Overall, I highly recommend the Knight Witch. If metriodvania bullet hell or wholesome dystopia sound appealing, this is the game for you.
