Knights in Tight Spaces expands on every part of the Fights in Tight Spaces’ template, but an abundance of new ideas swamps the clarity the original game had.
I’m torn because in theory, I should love Knights in Tight Spaces. It’s got everything I like. The guts of the game are carried over from Fights in Tight Spaces – a turn-based, Roguelike, deck-building beat-’em-up about fighting in confined spaces and using clever movement and manipulation of enemy attacks to win. I was very fond of that game because it made me feel like Jason Bourne beating people up with a biro. Knights in Tight Spaces takes that template and moves it to medieval fantasy, a setting I’ve loved my whole life, and adds more to it – character classes, a larger party to control, side quests, an equipment system, more dialogue… In theory it’s a win-win. Except in play I’m struggling to love it, and I wonder if this is a case where less is actually more.
A quick recap on how it works before I plunge into my argument. In Knights in Tight Spaces, you face scenarios where you’re surrounded by enemies on a gridded battlefield, usually themed around some small interior or exterior befitting of the setting – here, a drawbridge or a blacksmith’s forge or the ramparts of a castle, for example. Each round, you draw a handful of cards that relate to things you can do and spend ‘momentum’ (this game’s energy resource) to play them. Importantly, cards cover movement as well as attacks and defence, and moving around the battlefield is as important as thumping people.
Enemies telegraph where they’re going to attack at the end of the round, you see, so if you’re still standing in that space at the end of the round, you’ll get thumped. Like Into The Breach, then, the skill comes in worming your way out of danger, slipping around someone or leaping over them – and since their attacks are pre-determined, you’ll ideally want to move in such a way that leaves them attacking their friend rather than you. This is fundamental to success in the game. It’s a bit like chess in that it requires careful, calculated play. One well-placed move can change everything.
But whereas you were always a solo agent in Fights in Tight Spaces, outnumbered and outgunned, here in Knights you have help. You can now control up to three characters in a battle, all drawing from the same energy pool and deck of cards. And because there’s now a concept of groups, there’s also now a concept of varying types of character to fill those groups with. No longer is there only a default agent whose abilities are wholly represented by the deck you build while you play. Now, there are characters tied to distinct fantasy classes – like sorcerers and rogues and healers and fighters – each with pros and cons of their own.
Importantly, not all characters can use all types of cards. Magic cards are a good example of this: only those attuned to the arcane arts can play them, so most melee-based characters cannot. Similarly, only someone with a bow can fire arrows, which makes sense – they’d be rubbish if you just threw them at someone. When you recruit a new hero – which you’re allowed to do a short way through a run – they come with a small set of cards of their own, relating to things they do well, which are then mixed into your deck. Adding new recruits can feel quite disruptive, then, because a deck in a deck-building game is a carefully shaped thing – to have a cluster of cards suddenly appear can throw off whatever strategy you were using previously.
I should be clear that adding new recruits is optional, but I don’t see why you’d turn them down. One of Knights in Tight Spaces’ major new things – and something you as a player have to learn – is support attacks, which happen automatically whenever an enemy is hit in range of one of your companions. It’s a free hit, in other words. Judge it perfectly, and you can have all three of your characters attack but only ‘pay’ for one of them, if that makes sense. That’s massive in a game like this. It can change the shape of a battle, and it feels enormously satisfying to pull off.
Having additional heroes also raises your energy pool, and it gives you more options for equipping items you find or buy along the way, such as weapons and armour and potions. And these can be hugely beneficial, too. Even weaker items add useful buffs, but stronger ones can mix upgraded cards into your hands to use – really useful stuff. They’re Knights in Tight Spaces’ version of collectible power-ups, I suppose, a bit like the relics in Slay the Spire. Extra characters can be very useful, then. But they can be annoying, too.
With one character, there’s only ever one person to steer away from danger each round – one character to check will be okay from every angle when you press End Turn. Health doesn’t regenerate in these games, remember, so any damage you take will cumulatively accrue across battles. Carelessness, in other words, whittles you down. And there’s no coming back from the dead – die and that’s it, you’ll have to start again. (Although caveat: you can bring companions back from the dead by visiting a necromancer, which is a nice idea.) Keeping one character out of trouble is tricky enough – with three characters, it’s three times as hard.
This becomes more of an issue when the game’s challenge ramps up the further into a run you go, when enemies appear that don’t politely wait their turn to hit you. These enemies have abilities like auto-attack, which triggers whenever you disturb them. They can also counter-attack when you hit them, turn to face you when you step around them, or move when you move. Any of these things changes the shape of a battle, so you need to carefully read what each enemy does and factor it into what you do to counteract them. But it isn’t always clear what enemies are going to do – there’s a bit of a readability problem here. And it’s annoying when you take damage from a place you hadn’t realised you would, but it becomes even more devastating when it means one of your characters would get booted out of bounds and die in one hit. Yes, I’m still sore.
I’m used to this fastidiousness from other games of this type, but there’s something about punishment in Knights in Tight Spaces that makes it harder to shrug off. It seems uneven, as though you’ll be coasting for a long time and then suddenly come unstuck over a difficulty spike. Case in point: a six-hour run of mine was abruptly brought to an end because I picked a fight with a demon in a conversation – there were actually two of them – who turned out to be incredibly powerful, displaying all of the complex enemy behaviour mentioned above while also packing a devastating punch. I’m not sure if there was any way I could have won, and after around six hours of steady progress getting there, it felt like a brutal way to die.
The time-investment certainly has a lot to do with the bitterness: it doesn’t feel like we’re in compulsive ‘one more try’ territory here – in that sweet spot of an hour or two that other Roguelikes manage, where you ‘accidentally’ find yourself playing again. And of course with more time invested, there’s more you stand to lose each run. But there’s also a sense that the moment-to-moment feel of the game isn’t that alluring either, and that it lacks spark and punch. It’s as though the whole thing feels sleepy, even when you’re doing something as dramatic as smashing someone’s head onto a table – like you’re watching it all happen under water.
Knights in Tight Spaces also feels somewhat inhibited mechanically, and afraid of letting itself go wild and having fun. In Slay the Spire, for example, half of the appeal comes from believing this run might be the one where you assemble a collection of power-ups that break the game in your favour – that combine to ridiculous, devastating effect. But that never happens here. Upgrades feel muted and there are no fireworks popping off inside my head. It means that Knights in Tight Spaces can be unexciting to play, and you’ll feel that keenly a handful of hours in when you face another rote battle with no inherent appeal to it – but have to pay close attention nonetheless. There’s also a lingering feeling that the fundamental allure of wriggling out of impossible situations in tight confines doesn’t quite fit medieval fantasy as well as it did secret agents and spies – that the bones don’t quite fit the skin.
Like I said, I feel like I should love Knights in Tight Spaces, and I do appreciate all of the work that’s gone into it. The stark palette of the original game has been changed for something much warmer and more tavern-like, with lovely thick-pen-lined environments that you fight in. And I admire that Ground Shatter has made the effort to do something new rather than opt for an incremental update. I have no hesitation in saying there’s enjoyment to be found here. I just think the pudding has been overworked slightly, and that some of the clarity of flavour that came through in the original is swamped here.
A copy of Knights in Tight Spaces was provided for review by Raw Fury.
