Bahnsen Knights

I put on headphones before starting Bahnsen Knights, and I strongly recommend you do the same, because the chiptune soundscape LCB Game Studio built for this thing is half the experience. There is a near-constant oscillating drone threaded through the music that sits right at the edge of unnerving, the kind of sound design that makes a flat Midwestern highway feel genuinely dangerous. This is the third and final entry in the Pixel Pulps trilogy, following Mothmen 1966 and Varney Lake, and it arrives as arguably the most mechanically confident of the three. You play Boulder, an undercover government agent embedded inside the titular cult, a fanatical outfit of Ford Sierra-driving road exorcists led by Toni, a used-car salesman who decided F5 tornadoes were God's message and decided to answer back. Your partner Cupra went in first and vanished, so now you carry a fabricated identity, a building suspicion meter, and a growing dread that this assignment is going to cost you something you cannot afford to lose. The writing leans hard into second-person pulp-detective interiority, which lands beautifully in moments of paranoia and pays for itself whenever the dialogue between Boulder and Toni crackles with threat. A minority of critics found Boulder's internal monologues about his absent family repetitive, and that is a fair read, but it did not blunt the atmosphere for me. The gameplay layered over the visual novel scaffolding is the densest in the series. You gather evidence and assign it to prayer cards, working a tarot-adjacent deduction mechanic to build your case. A suspicion meter fills if you make wrong moves, and game over is always plausible. Minigames include darts, a modified solitaire variant, timed evidence searches where guards circle back, and a road exorcism sequence that drops the game into something resembling a pixelated SpyHunter with a human being strapped to the hood of an oncoming car. That last one arrives completely unannounced and is genuinely one of the best two minutes in the whole Pixel Pulps run. Some timed controller sequences drew complaints for imprecise input, and one car-boot lockpicking puzzle frustrated several reviewers with its single-guess structure. These are real friction points, not imagined ones. Visually, the team works in a tight EGA-inspired palette of red, magenta, cyan, white, and black. The illustrations are still images punctuated by spare animations, and the overall effect is closer to a low-bit graphic novel than anything the word screenshot can prepare you for. The cult's color-coded Ford Sierras, the dive bar with photographs above the jukebox, the open-sky tornado sequences, all of it is composed with the care of people who know exactly what mood they are after. The game is standalone, no prior Pixel Pulps knowledge required, though a thin supernatural thread connects all three entries for players who want to pull on it. The honest caveat is runtime: two to three hours on a first playthrough, with branching paths and a gallery of achievement-unlocked artwork providing reason to return. If short games feel like incomplete games to you, this will frustrate. But Bahnsen Knights knows exactly where it wants to end and stops there, which is a craft decision I respect enormously. An 78 Metacritic and 97 percent positive Steam user score from early reviewers suggest the critical community landed somewhere similar.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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