After a whole year of previews and waiting, I finally got to play through all of The Knightling last month – and my patience was absolutely rewarded. Despite being a modern and refreshing experience it also feels so nostalgic, as a perfect cocktail made up of PS2-era platformers, Zelda dungeons and puzzles, and open world shield surfing. It’s wild that this total package of a game is a debut title, and because of this Twirlbound Studios will be on my radar for years to come.
With so many exciting elements that make up the game, it was particularly great to be given the opportunity to interview the developers. It was particularly easy to come up with questions for this specific Q&A, because there was genuinely so much I wanted to know about The Knightling. From the character themselves to the puzzle difficulty there’s a lot that makes The Knightling special, and in this exclusive interview with Matthijs van de Laar (Creative Director / Writer / CEO) you can find out all about it. Don’t click away or you’ll miss the shield surfing chat.
After a long time The Knightling is finally here and people are playing it, how has the reaction been from players?
It’s been fantastic to see people finally immerse themselves in the world we’ve spent so much time in already, and the response has been very positive! The love we have for Clesseia seems to shine through and people love moving around with the Knightling. There’s always things to improve but we’re very happy so far!
The Knightling had a demo that was featured in a Steam Next Fest, do you think this helped build excitement in people?
For sure. It was a bit scary at first, mainly because the game wasn’t fully done yet, but it helped so much for people to understand what the game was and to build excitement for the story before and after the demo. Many players call out the demo as a main reason they checked out the full game!
I love the concept of the Knightling as a character, what made you decide to feature such an underdog hero?
The most interesting stories are about characters who have recognizable flaws, so making a character around a specific role with a specific image that’s hard to break out of is a good foundation for a character like that. We wanted to break away from the standard conventions of strong heroes with swords and shields and wanted to focus on a character who is sort of an ‘assistant’/underdog by trade, really looking to prove themselves to be that respected hero.
The idea of a shield being the signature weapon of a character is pretty unique, how did you decide on this for combat?
The core idea of the game started with: what if we make a game with only a shield? So rather than starting with that from a combat-perspective, we started on a holistic level and were looking for creative ways to use a shield in general. Of course that means we focus on blocking and parrying, but to keep things interesting we opted for melee attacks and shield throwing too.
Shield surfing in The Knightling just feels perfect, how long did it take to perfect this method of getting around?
That was a long process of tweaking and testing! An important pivotal moment was when we realized that we needed to make it more lenient than was maybe intuitive, e.g. helping players going upwards on slopes with a little boost too, as it was just more fun than a purely physics-based/grounded approach. From there the playfulness won every time and it turned into the fun locomotion we have today!
The puzzles in The Knightling require a lot of thought and observation of your surroundings, were you ever worried they’d be too difficult for players?
That’s always a bit of a worry with making puzzles, especially cause we’ve seen them a million times and we crave for some complexity after a while. But through proper playtesting we always try to hit the right balance.
There are a lot of different elements to The Knightling that reminded me of some of my other favourite video games. What games would you say inspired it?
Some big inspirations were Okami for its approach to world structure and player progression; Jak & Daxter for the open levels with platforming and the playable character dynamics; God of War (2018) for its multipurpose axe and games like Immortals: Fenyx Rising for shading or visual style. And with a genre like this, almost any game can be an inspiration!
Was there any content you had to cut for the 1.0 release of The Knightling? Either for time reasons or because they just didn’t fit with the game.
There’s a lot of little things we had to cut, but we built it up in a way that kept the most important things intact if we had to cut. Some shield mechanics were a bit more involved than they might have ended up in the game, and there’s a whole bunch of quests and content ideas we had that we didn’t end up having time for. But there’s still plenty to do!
What are your plans going forward as a studio? Do you see yourself making more The Knightling content, a sequel, or something else entirely?
We really want to get good at this genre, and with The Knightling we’ve discovered the importance of strong movement/locomotion in open world games like this. We want to keep pushing for that and make sure we keep building worlds people want to get lost in!
With things hopefully calming down now the game has fully released, are there any video games in your backlog you’re excited to jump into now?
A certain other game with ‘knight’ in the title just came out… A lot of us will be playing that!
Thanks to Matthijs for their time.
The Knightling is out now for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.
