Skautfold: Moonless Knight Review (Switch)

We’ll admit to not being aware of the Skautfold series. Apparently, there are a ton of games out there set in this interconnected indie world across a range of genres. What drew us to Moonless Knight was the notion of a top-down action Metroidvania set in alternate ancient Japan featuring demons and samurai’s. It certainly sounded like something different, and it claims to have a unique battle system as well. 

Stylistically, Moonless Knight sets the tone really well. The eerie, cursed environment comes across strongly with some suitably spooky music and mist drifting across the place. The ancient Japanese setting is also handled well enough with the thing looking not a million miles away from Rocky and Pocky if the colour palette had been toned down. If anything, there is a bit too much detail at times and some of textures don’t blend together in the best way. A slightly cleaner design approach would probably have benefited everyone. 

The story goes that you have been sent to retrieve and ancient relic from the emperor’s castle. Upon arriving you find that a luna cult has taken over and now there are cosmic barriers keeping the rest of the soldiers getting in to win the castle back. As such you must head the resistance from within your hiding place in the castle grounds and keep the emperor hidden.

Combat is certainly unique, but we didn’t find it something that ever really clicked or became enjoyable. There are ways to avoid and block attacks, and of course doing so with split second timing creates bonus effects. There are also a ton of different weapons to get hold of and upgrade. But it always felt too sluggish, I do wonder if it would have been better almost as an auto striker kind of game as you have a strength bar which effectively acts as a timer to say when you initiate an attack. It’s also quite difficult to tell if you are making contact with the enemy when striking and keeping an eye on the various armour, strength and damage bars meant we never were never really sure who was winning a battle until someone keeled over. 

When you die you return to the main base with any money you’ve found and are free to go out and explore again. While in the base there are a lot of different characters to talk to get advice or fill in sections of the back story. Unfortunately, this has some of the most frustrating text skipping controls we’ve come across. We read quite quickly but the option when in dialogue is either to let it run at its slow pace or skip the sentence completely. You can go back and then check the conversation log, but would it have been so difficult just to make text appear a full sentence at a time? This, perhaps more than anything else, really took us out of the game experience. 

Overall, Skautfold: Moonless Knight is an interesting idea and if you do end up gelling with the combat then its certainly intriguing and interesting enough to take up a considerable amount of your time. We just found it a bit too slow and clunky though. There’s certainly something good in here but there were too many rough edges for us to really get into it. 

Overall 5/10