The Knight Witch

I have a soft spot for the games that try to be three things at once and nearly pull it off. The Knight Witch is exactly that: a hand-drawn metroidvania where you fly freely through an underground city called Dungeonidas, dodge dense walls of enemy fire, and manage a customisable deck of over 30 spell cards mid-combat. Super Mega Team is a tiny studio, and the ambition here is honestly kind of audacious. The core loop holds together better than it has any right to. You play as Rayne, an underdog trainee who never quite made the official Knight Witch roster, now pressed into service when War Golems start tearing through the city. There is no jumping - Rayne floats constantly, guided by twin-stick aiming and a shoulder-button fire. It reads awkward on paper, but once the dash ability unlocks and you start weaving through projectile storms, the movement clicks into something genuinely satisfying. The five main areas open up gradually as you earn new traversal skills, and backtracking to crack open previously blocked rooms with a freshly upgraded kit is exactly the quiet pleasure the genre promises. For fans of Iconoclasts or the lighter end of the Shantae series, the pacing will feel familiar and comfortable. The card system is the real wildcard. Three spells from your equipped deck are randomly surfaced to the face buttons at any time, powered by mana dropped from enemies. You can build toward lightning bolts, machine-gun bursts, shield explosions, and stun procs - or lean on a duplicate merchant to stack the spells you love and thin out the filler. Some players will find the randomness maddening in a tough ambush room; others will find the constant cycling creates a pleasing rhythm of spend-and-replenish. Notably, the developers made a principled call to remove skill trees entirely, keeping the mental overhead focused on the deck and a simple fork between boosting shot damage or spell power when you level up. Levelling itself is tied to a "Link" system: the more citizens you rescue and talk to, the stronger Rayne becomes, which gives real mechanical weight to the exploration. Where the game earns its mixed reception is in a handful of locked "ambush" encounters that trap you in a room until every enemy is dead. When bullet density spikes during these and the frame rate stumbles (most reported on consoles at launch, though PC players noted it too), frustration arrives fast. Some boss fights share that same quality of feeling punishing rather than precisely hard. The moral choice system - press conferences after missions where lying earns more XP but carries later consequences - adds a lovely narrative texture that the story otherwise only sketches at. The hand-drawn art, though, is genuinely gorgeous throughout, detailed environments with personality in every corner, and Rayne's idle animation sipping tea at save points is the kind of small handcraft detail that makes an indie feel loved. If you can tolerate occasional difficulty spikes and a card draw that does not always cooperate, The Knight Witch is the kind of compact, confident genre experiment that rewards patience. Play it with a controller on PC - mouse and keyboard genuinely fights the twin-stick fundamentals - and give the accessibility options a fair look rather than treating them as admissions of defeat. Kai, Scout Team