Fights in Tight Spaces came out in 2023 to little fanfare but a fair amount of praise. A roguelike turn-based melee game, it followed the snazzy-dressed Agent 11 on a globe-trotting mission to destabilise a bunch of cartels by beating people up in very small rooms. Ground Shatter has followed it up now with Knights in Tight Spaces on PC, a medieval-themed sequel that swaps the minimalist colour scheme for a very attractive carved wood aesthetic but keeps the broad strokes of gameplay the same.
In Knights in Tight Spaces you play an adventurer who gets embroiled in a criminal power struggle mainly because you can’t keep your nose out of trouble. When this segues into a much more far-reaching mystery, you’re already in too deep to back out. That’s if you can get that far, of course. Being a roguelike, Knights often struggles to keep any momentum in a story that feels like it really needs it.
Each run begins with you picking a class from an initial choice of three, Fighter, Brawler and Rogue. The first two are melee-focused while the third has a bow. It doesn’t take long to unlock a Sorcerer for a little more flexibility. For the first few fights you’ll be alone until you can recruit a second, and then third party member. You’ll need to earn money to do this, which means not only surviving fights but also completing secondary objectives where possible.
My biggest issue with Knights in Tight Spaces is a direct result of the roguelike structure, though. The RPG element of building a party and upgrading each individual with looted armour and weapons simply feels at odds with having to constantly begin from scratch when you lose. There’s nothing procedural here, you see, and not really any way to improve on a run other than to take less damage or earn more gold. So repeated losses just make you play the same thing over and over until you reach whatever hard part you lost at last time, and if you lose again, you start again. Every time.
So characters have the same dialogue and personality regardless of your choice of class, and the world never reacts differently to you. There’s one path to walk, which takes you through the same bosses and mini-bosses. You can opt now and then to visit the Trader, Tavern or Blacksmith, but can only ever pick one. So you can only heal, upgrade, or collect new cards every so many fights. It genuinely became incredibly tedious to keep losing on the same tough fight only to have to re-do the last ten or so to catch back up, only to lose again – and the only thing you unlock between runs are more cards. You don’t retain equipment or consumables, either.
As with its predecessor, Knights in Tight Spaces features a card system for your attack and defence abilities. Each round you’ll receive 3 action points to spend on cards, while some actions are free. For example, you can usually push or shove enemies for nothing, to give yourself some space. Stages take place in small, grid-based arenas in a variety of locations from taverns and castle roads to flowing streams and sewers.
Depending on the difficulty settings you and the enemy will take it in turns, with an onus on positioning. If you leave yourself open to a straight arrow shot, the enemy will take it every time, and other opponents will drop in during the course of most encounters. What makes Knights in Tight Spaces doubly hard is that you can very rarely heal between fights. Sometimes you might be able to rest at a tavern to heal, or the odd encounter will restore some health – you can even get hold of consumables now and then. But the amount of health restored is either low or at the cost of an essential upgrade or extra party member and, frankly, you’ll suffer death by a thousand cuts more often than not. I expected it to feel a little easier once I had two or three party members, but because it doesn’t multiply your action points by number of party members (one gets three, two get five, and three get seven) and the more powerful cards use multiple points, I was making progress by increments, maybe getting through an extra stage or two each run, which just meant having to replay more every time. And the random nature of the card selection and gear drops means that an unlucky run is likely to fail.
You can choose to draft your own deck for each new run, but this is seriously double-edged. You choose 12 cards from what you have unlocked, but not in the way you’d expect. Instead you choose one of three random cards 12 times, meaning that you might end up with a deck you simply can’t make the most out of. As a Sorcerer I gave up doing this because it never gave me Sorcerer-specific attacks to choose from. Not once, not ever. Trying to play the so-called “Endless Mode” this way is nigh-impossible, as there are no breaks between fights to heal or upgrade or draw new cards.
The reason Fights in Tight Spaces worked so well was the simplicity of it all. Knights, in contrast, loads a little too much into the cannon at once. Everything works wonderfully well, but it simply doesn’t need a roguelike element to the campaign. By all means make it tough, but constantly restarting the same story and playing the same conversations and encounters doesn’t feel good. It becomes repetitive and boring, and where I’d normally get into the loop of a roguelike, here I couldn’t because I just wanted to see where the story would go. Until I had failed too many times in one afternoon and realised I didn’t care enough to push through.
That said, the aesthetic and music work well within the medieval setting to offer a different atmosphere altogether from the previous game. Ground Shatter has written a decent story, too, with dialogue that gets a little too quippy but does the job. The visuals are also great, with dozens of attack and ability animations and dynamic camera angles.
While Knights in Tight Spaces looks better and is certainly larger than the last game, it feels like Ground Shatter have overplayed their hand a little. It’s much more frustrating than Fights was, in a multitude of ways, and I just struggled to get into any kind of proper rhythm with it. Even on lower difficulty levels, it felt like a matter of time before I just lost each time, and that’s not a fun time. Those with more patience or a greater mind of tactics than I might get more out of it, but Knights in Tight Spaces feels like two steps forward and one hop back where it counts.
