Knight's Night! is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere.
And this is certainly one of the laziest, worst put together platformer ever made. Mechanically this is a ripoff of Super Mario Bros only the developers wouldn't work out breaking bricks with your head, so it lacks many of the features and gimmicks of SMB. The developers, embarrassingly, claim this is a "1 bit platformer" because they were lazy and used monochrome graphics, lazy even for pixelcrap. This reveals a lot about the devs not understanding the basics of gaming and modern computing.
The "bit count" (8 bit, 16 bit) refers to the processor data path... no computer was ever made with a 1-bit data path. That's a stupid idea.
When we talk about data path, what this means is the computers ALI and the size of the registers (think of these as the beads on an abacus, but each register holds a bunch of data). Old computers (including stuff like the NES and Commodore 64) had an 8 bit bus, meaning the registers could only carry 255 characters around. Bust that up to 16 bits and suddenly you're pushing exponential amounts of data around... meaning better graphics and gameplay and resolution.
The developers weird ignorance about the basics of computing go a long way to explaining why this is such a badly, lazily made platformer, but it excuses none of it.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2025 (and this was released not so far back in 2025), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 130,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 130,000+ games on Steam?
Knight's Night! has the gamer gouging price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. No pixelcrap is worth 5 bucks, especially when it's this lazy.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "X-Com: Enemy Unknown", "Batman: Arkham Asylumn" or "Mass Effect 3". No pixelcrap is worth $5. If developers want to get paid the same kind of money as real game developers who know how to do graphics properly, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
