A few turn-based card games have captured my attention and kept it. Inscryption was one of these games, as the terror and strategy made for a good time. Another game was Hearthstone for ‘don’t need to tell you’ reasons. You can now put Knights in Tight Spaces on that list. I just kicked my Balatro addiction, I certainly didn’t need a new one. BUT HERE WE ARE.
Knights in Tight Spaces from developer Ground Shatter is an interesting turn-based strategy game led by card actions and a healthy dose of a DnD storytelling structure. It hits all the right notes and offers subtle upgrades, damning choices, and enough avenues to tread with a strategy that you might need a Rand McNally map to feel more comfortable.
While the game doesn’t do everything right, as the actual action can get a little bit repetitive at times, especially early on, the payoff for success is certainly richer than any debt the game owes where it falls short.
So, sit back. Relax a bit. Sharpen your sword and your silver tongue, and let’s get moving on this turn-based card game review.
DnD – it’s dynamite
The first thing you will come across during your adventures with Knights in Tight Spaces is how it integrates a DnD-type structure into the gameplay. Upon launching the game, you’ll be thrown into witty banter with a barkeep and come across a dialogue fork in the road. How you choose to approach and execute the fork in the road determines how you benefit from the conversation (gold, items, health) and where you take the story.
This branching narrative of sorts is a subtle piece of Knights in Tight Spaces gameplay structure that works well to keep the player locked in while helping to ignore some repetitive gameplay (we will get to that in a second). It flows naturally with the actual gameplay and helps to maintain player engagement. It certainly activated my old DnD days, if only briefly. The story was so good and fun to keep up with that I looked forward to the next bit of banter and story progression as I jumped from fight to fight.
In addition, the characters in the story help to make it a lot deeper than what the gameplay offered. You’ve got a good mix of dastardly enemies, chaotic neutral secret societies, and plenty of people to threaten and harass. The storytelling and choices are a good part of the game.
Scoot and boot
The core gameplay of Knights in Tight Spaces is just what it is named – “Knights in Tight Spaces”. When you go into battle in KTS, you’re thrown onto a small, isometric 3D map that you can pan around. You move using cards that you have been given (and can collect), which come in a variety of flavors – moving, defending, and attacking. Each card costs a certain number of round points, and you must think about your choice of card before you use the said points and end your turn.
The cards help to drive the action and strategy in the game, and I’m enormously impressed with the variety of cards that you can mix and match to get the most out of the gameplay. Having cards that allow you to dual-kick two enemies or push them back a few spaces to take oncoming fire from another enemy is brilliant. There are so many different cards to play which contain various actions that the strategic depth of the gameplay is out of this world so good. I think strategy is the strongest part of Knights in Tight Spaces, as it helps keep the action fresh and the player can uniquely initiate battle in so many ways. All of it is led by what cards you hold in your hand, and what decisions you make when you acquire new ones. You’ll find yourself thoughtfully thumbing through new card options because of proven strategy and success.
The only other part of the gameplay that comes close to rivaling the cards and strategy is the upgradability of your character. As you traverse from point to point on the map/level you play on, you will occasionally come across three choices to use your XP/coins you gained from battle. Those choices include visiting a tavern to recover or recruit members, going to a Blacksmith, or visiting a trader to purchase items or card upgrades. Once you choose who to visit, then you’re restricted from the other two places. Much like the story, you must choose your path wisely.
Recruiting and recovering at a tavern is a smart move if you need help. Having another warrior on a map helps to tame large numbers of enemies. In a sense, partners can act as an extra life and help to extend the gameplay, which offers yet another layer of strategy to the game. When you recruit characters at taverns, you choose from a variety of talents and the cards they’re armed with. You can also gain recruits from the story.
If you go the Blacksmith route, you can upgrade or acquire new weapons. The big issue with this choice is gaining coins from battle and branching story decisions, which lead to trickles of coins and not waterfalls. This hurt the game a little bit, as your efforts to out-strategize enemies on a map should be far more rewarding than it tends to be. Acquiring new weapons also doesn’t guarantee huge jumps in strength, nor does new armor guarantee big leaps in defense. While I love that a card game like this gets more complicated than the typical turn-based card experience, it does fall short in some areas, such as this. Feeling like you can be rewarded big for your efforts and progress means that the player thinks they have a great chance of future battle success. That progression is driven in part by coins acquired.
The last place to visit is a trader, who sells you goods and will offer to upgrade cards. While I like this aspect of the game, it isn’t quite as impactful as the other two options, although upgrading cards is nice, it’s still a crapshoot on whether those cards make an appearance during battle. Cards are dealt at random. I found it hard to choose this path over the other two.
Enemies to die multiple times
Knights in Tight Spaces does a wonderful job of providing some interesting enemies. As you progress, the game throws in new enemies regularly, which helps to alleviate some of the repetitiveness the game can stumble onto from time to time. The variety of enemies bring their ways of fighting, their intelligence when it comes to taking full advantage of an opportunity, and devilish ideas that keep the gameplay engaging and interesting.
Now, how those enemies go about fights is equally important to their coolness. When enemies drop on a map, they must face you to initiate offense. If they don’t face you, then it will cost them a turn to face you. While on the surface it might seem like this type of detail would make the gameplay boring and slow, it’s a wonderful part of the enemy ethos in Knights in Tight Spaces. Every move the enemy makes costs a move point, which allows you extra time to strategize, especially if you’re cornered in a bad situation. Some enemies can be powerful from short range or will be deadly from long. But adding movement and point restrictions to enemies means that the playing field is even regardless of power. There were so many times during my gameplay sessions when I thought that I was done for, only to realize that the enemy wasn’t in my line of sight. It saved my tail more times than not.
While this little bundle of gameplay joy is great, the game also has other enemy aspects that add even more strategy to the action. The big one that helped during a few fights in the game was how the enemies could damage each other should they be in the other’s line of fire. For a game of this type, enemy fire generally would go through their best friends and make its way to the player’s character. In Knights in Tight Spaces that is not the case. For example, if there is an enemy archer who is getting ready to fire at my character during the next round, I can play a move card on the enemy and bump them into the line of fire of the archer. The archer will already be locked into his target, my guy, so he must shoot through his to get to me. Sadly, yet happily the archer will hit his teammate, which helps to keep me alive while damaging their dude. I took down so many enemies through their friends in this game. It’s a big part of what makes the gameplay so much fun.
Now, if that wasn’t enough with enemies, the game features various types of gameplay as you progress through the adventure. Sometimes it’s just simply fighting and defeating whoever is on the map. Sometimes it’s having to survive a constant enemy onslaught for a set amount of time. And even sometimes it can be protecting people to the best of your ability and taking down enemies before they reach innocent villagers. Knights in Tight Spaces does a phenomenal job of mixing up the gameplay types during chapters, which helps to keep the gameplay interesting and engaging. All of this before you get to fight uniquely powerful bosses at the end of each chapter. That’s some good effort, ideas, and execution from the developers.
My only big issue with the enemies was how the early fights felt slow and repetitive. I truly thought that this was going to be a one-dimensional experience and not go beyond just fighting a finite type of enemy on a map. Granted, there were some repetitive enemies here and there but once the game hit its stride, it started to show its enemy feathers. It was impressive.
Before I wrap this review, I must complement the devs on keeping the player in the game after their character’s demise. The devs want you to jump back into the scrum of the game once you die, but they do it fairly. If you had 30% of your health at the start of the round you died in, then when you replay the round, you will come back with that same percentage. Going this route with the gameplay means you have hard decisions to make – can you truly out-strategize the moment and pull the win out, or should you just start the adventure over and do better? Neither option is going to be easy, but the fact that the devs provide those routes means that you can take a road that you choose, which gives a bit more agency to the gaming experience.
Beyond all the above, there are side quests you can unlock and other goodies, so in the end the gameplay experience is far bigger than this genre deserves, and hopefully, this is a trend that keeps going.
On that note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
Knights in Tight Spaces from developer Ground Shatter and Raw Fury is an exceptional game that shows how well a turn-based card game can be when given a thick amount of strategy from good gameplay design and a branching story to help push it all along. While it isn’t perfect, it’s still a bar set for future games in this genre.
