Knights And Bikes

I went into Knights and Bikes half-expecting a breezy two-hour throwaway, and came out eight hours later thinking about Demelza for the rest of the evening. Foam Sword is a tiny British studio built by former Media Molecule staff - the people behind Tearaway and LittleBigPlanet - and every screen of this game carries that lineage. The art looks like oil pastels and construction paper stitched together by a restless kid: outlines of ancient knights and imagined dragons appear superimposed over windswept Cornish beaches, decayed fairgrounds, and muddy forest paths. It won the IGF Excellence in Visual Art award, and honestly it was not a surprise. The setup is a 1980s coming-of-age treasure hunt on the fictional island of Penfurzy. Demelza is a local kid whose family is on the verge of losing everything; Nessa is an orphan who just washed in on the last ferry of the season. They meet, form an instant bond, and decide to find the island's legendary lost treasure before everything falls apart. The story earns real emotional weight - moments where Demelza quietly grieves her absent mother hit harder than you expect in something that also involves fighting a cursed librarian and rehydrating shrimp at the harbor. The writing treats children as people with complicated inner lives, and that respect translates into characters you genuinely want to follow. Mechanically the game is a top-down action-adventure with strong Secret of Mana DNA. Demelza starts by boot-stomping enemies, Nessa opens with a frisbee throw, and both gradually acquire new tools - water balloons, a plunger that pulls remote switches through gates, a boom-box loud enough to shake the undead. Puzzles ask the two characters to use their distinct abilities in tandem, and in co-op that coordination creates moments of genuine delight. The game supports local co-op, online co-op, and solo play with a competent AI partner; you can also swap between the two characters yourself mid-fight with a shoulder button. Solo is totally functional, though reviewers and players consistently noted it feels thinner than the intended two-player experience. The co-op is where the design breathes. Between fights, you ride customised bikes across the island, barter junk with NPCs for upgrades and cosmetic streamers, and feed and tend to Captain Honkers the goose, who doubles as a treasure-detection system. The island of Penfurzy is small but richly detailed, and wandering it is almost always pleasant. Here is where I have to be honest about the cracks. The combat does not evolve enough across the roughly eight-hour runtime to stay engaging - enemy variety is thin, encounters follow a repeating formula, and the final act outstays the natural conclusion by about 45 minutes. Puzzle design is similarly conservative: most solutions involve using your newest ability in the exact way it was just introduced, with little variation. If you go in expecting the mechanical depth of a classic Zelda dungeon, you will be underwhelmed. Nessa is also noticeably underwritten compared to Demelza, which creates an odd imbalance in two-player sessions where someone always ends up as the less interesting half. None of that fully dims what Foam Sword made here. Daniel Pemberton's soundtrack - the same composer behind Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse - is warm, propulsive, and completely alive to the mood of each scene. The soundscape alone carries the game through its slower stretches. Knights and Bikes knows exactly what it wants to be: a gentle, handcrafted tribute to childhood adventure, grief, and the specific freedom of riding a bike somewhere no adult told you to go. If you have a friend to play with, particularly a younger one, this is close to ideal. Solo players will still find something worth their time, but treat it as a story first and an action game second. Kai, Scout Team