Shady Knight

Shady Knight is a game all about flow: the movement is buttery smooth, the combat is creatively opportunistic and the music complements the gameplay rather than taking the forefront. Your entire moveset is available right from the start, but so much of it is contextual that you're not confronted with it all at once. This helps to ease the player into the game while still allowing you to explore all the niche little tricks that Shady Knight has to offer. To further help guide the player, Shady Knight also comes with a built-in slow-motion feature called Focus which is an excellent learning tool that gives the player more time to think about their moves at the cost of draining your style point meter. While in Focus, you can also read writing on certain walls that give you little nudges on what moves you can try without forcing you into any specific playstyle. There's even a training arena with even more tips and lots of room for experimentation! There are what feels like a near infinite amount of ways to go about any combat encounter, which gives the game a combat-sandbox feel which I personally adore. Do you engage the enemy directly? Do you use the environment (barrels, spikes, fire sources etc.) to your advantage? Maybe you parry an enemy attack to stagger them, just to then kick them so hard that they slam into a wall, after which you throw your weapon and pin them to the wall. Most enemies drop weapons on death, which can be dashed to from a distance to smoothly transition from fighting to parkour as you now fly through the air looking for your next target. Performing parkour moves like the aforementioned weapon dash or the ubiquitous wall-kick actually powers up a portion of your moveset, which furthermore emphasises the ebb and flow cycle of parkour and combat. Visually the game looks great, though there's a notable lack of variety to the level visuals and the structures (most levels are towers, where you aim to reach the Orb at the top). The game's Quickmap editor allows users to create and share their own levels, which helps a lot for the replayability and exploration of different more unique level structures. Other than that though, from a completionist's perspective, the game is quite short. The main campaign can be done in a couple hours, and after that you will mostly be returning to old levels to get better scores, find new moves to use that you missed (which the game tracks) and to explore both the levels and the game's systems. If you typically just play through games once and move on, then you might find Shady Knight's playtime somewhat disappointing for its price tag. In my opinion though, "completing" Shady Knight is a bit besides the point, as the focus here is much more on being a rich movement/combat sandbox rather than being a one-and-done packaged experience. In the end Shady Knight is a game for people that want to explore an interesting, fluid and diverse system that mixes movement and combat in a very unique and fun way!

pretty lit

Игра хорошая, но не за эту стоимость.

Fun

the hp system is odd the gimmicks are unintuitive, picking up weapons with the spacebar barely functions and is impossible to do when in combat, chains, pitons, and ropes feel way to hard to grab. came back after a while of not playing and struggled to navigate even just the lobby, trying to figure out how to get to the new levels while also not being skilled enough from roughly a year of not playing the game led to constantly dying and not understanding what happened. the saws found in the "obsession" area being able to kill you instantly without putting you in the "harmed" state was just frustrating as even though I'm perfectly fine trying to bounce on them to redirect them their way to fast and kill you to quickly for it to be useful. also there where enemies that just couldn't be hurt because of (and I'm just assuming) they had a little border thing to tell me their invincible but because I haven't played the game in so long I have no idea how to get rid of that effect without using the saws but because of issues I just stated that's not easy to do. I could go back to earlier levels to relearn these gimmicks but because of the aforementioned terrible lobby I don't know where those earlier levels are or how to get to them. another thing on the lobby is that hitting the water is guaranteed death, but you don't have ANY air control so if you miss a rope, piton, or chain you just have to watch as you hit the water and die with no way to even pretend you can maneuver back to safety so getting around the lobby just feels like trial and error without solid feedback. I would love to love this game but it just feels like it's spitting in my face every time I mess up and the gimmicks aren't understandable enough for me to learn from my failures, which leads to them not feeling like failures, and instead feeling like insults.

Only Gotten 1/3 of the way but its already amazing i love the high speed and mechanical thinking and timing that it requires it makes you sweat when you have SS and you don't want to get hit

how is the demo better then the full game ;-;

Games awesome, saw it release day and was impressed :)

awesome pretty short game with great gameplay and a bit of story