“Knight Crawlers” is a ragdoll physics-based dungeon crawler by freshly formed Good Morning Games and published by The Iterative Collective. A rouge-lite crawler that brings fun energy through awkward flailing movements both during combat and while running around exploring.

Playing as a Crawler, you’re tasked with making your way through dungeons, collecting loot, and fighting enemies through the Lost Realms. Enemies of the Corrupted Realms must be stopped and we’re just the person to do it. With low-poly environments and characters, the silly vibes this game sets out to deliver fit the bill. I wasn’t overly a fan of the style having seen the assets before, but I appreciated how they were used and absolutely adore the skill card art.

Speaking of, to face the hordes requires upgrades via skill cards and weapons found in the dungeons. Upon entering a zone there’s an amount of freedom to spawn in the enemies for a more varied playstyle. Skill cards range from new spells to buffs, and weapons can be upgraded and customised using Dominion Points. Bonuses granted by the boons give plenty of information about how they will aid your adventure so it was always clear how each would make my character stronger on my travels solo.

The PvP mode intends to throw players into an arena against other crawlers and I was looking forward to watching characters wobble around as they hack and slash. Playing with friends during crawls is another way to play for that extra oomph in the field. That said, Knight Crawlers is couch co-op, so unless you have someone over, you can’t exactly play it. I’m eager to see how combat with and against others plays out.

Combat, while fun for its movement style, becomes an issue for me when facing hordes as I often couldn’t tell whether I was doing damage or being damaged. I often didn’t know that the hordes were hurt until they were unexpectedly defeated. Sometimes feedback of the controls versus what was happening felt off, and occasionally the combat input was unresponsive, with no indication of my Crawler attacking.

This was more noticeable when swapping from keyboard to controller; on keyboard, I was sometimes unable to hit prompts, whereas using a controller was much more responsive. As a result, my progression could be hindered which impacted my enjoyment whenever I was getting invested in the grind for more boosters during my battles.

The game ran well on PC with no performance issues for me. The issue was mostly down to limited options in the menu and UI problems. There were no slideable scales for sound, rather, simple toggle on/off buttons, while the music, ambience, and sound effects were well-done, I would have liked the option to adjust it.

When switching from keyboard to controller, the inputs in-game still reflected PC prompts which felt like an oversight, though a fairly insignificant one. Quality of life improvements like these would’ve given me a lot more room to move forward to the next stages.

Knight Crawlers poses a clever take on dungeon crawlers but it feels like it needs a few more upgrades to knock it out of the park. At the time of writing, the game is in the process of playtesting and I’m keen to see how they up the ante as it nears release. Knight Crawlers has a lot of potential and the antics awaiting players are something to look forward to down the line.

Written by: Yasmin Noble