Knights in Tight Spaces Review – Miniature Medieval Battles with Cards

Knights in Tight Spaces Review

You’d be forgiven if your eyes glaze over at the phrase “turn-based card battle game.” To put it mildly, there are a lot of titles in the genre. Sometimes, however, games bubble up from the stew of copycats. 2021’s Fights in Tight Spaces was a stylish, spy vs spy deck builder. Aside from a striking visual aesthetic, it played out small fights on confined grids where the environments could be used to advantage. Knights in Tight Spaces brings back most of the mechanics but in an entirely new setting, with a brand new art style.

Pick A Card, Any Card (That Will Win the Battle)

Knights in Tight Spaces starts simply. You pick a character from a handful of fantasy archetypes (brawler, rogue, mage, etc.) and begin the campaign. Each stop along the way to the boss is either a battle or the chance to recover, buy gear, new cards, or upgrade old ones. Each battle has the main objective of defeating rounds of enemies, but there are bonus sub-objectives that offer additional rewards. These are things like pushing an enemy outside the boundary or dispatching all enemies in a set number of turns.

Each of the character types comes with a large assortment of cards based on skills unique to that class, like spells for the mage or acrobatic moves for the rogue. Where Knights in Tight Spaces becomes interesting is in the way cards synergize with each other and the environments. Because the stages are very small and often crowded, many attacks impact a number of enemies. For example, kicking an enemy backward into another enemy injures them both.

The synergies really start to click when the party grows into a team of two or three, each with a very specific deck. While a large party offers an incredible array of options, the constricted nature of the battlefield places limits, too. As it grows more complex, it takes on a very satisfying puzzle game element.

ABC-Always Be Carding

Death means either trying the stage again or ending the run completely, but as in all rogue-lites, there are persistent rewards that carry over between runs. Even at normal difficulty, Knights in Tight Spaces offers plenty of challenges. There’s also lots of depth and an endless amount of replay value baked into its systems. The game does an overall excellent job of onboarding new players. For those coming to the game from the previous title, there’s a tutorial highlighting changes in mechanics. It’s an easy game to pick up and play. And play and play.

If there’s one element that disappoints, it’s the narrative that threads the battles together. Entirely text-based, it lacks impact and substance and I found myself impatiently clicking through it more often than not just to move on to the next choice, story beat, reward, or assignment. That said, it isn’t without wit. The game’s music was likewise not especially inspired. Mostly electronic, the musical colors and styles seemed at odds with the medieval setting and got repetitive during battles. The combat and card systems were so addictive, I kept wishing that all the stuff around them was more engaging.

Going All Medieval On You

I’ll be honest: I wasn’t crazy about Fights in Tight Spaces’ art, which was highly stylized and sort of in Superhot’s aesthetic wheelhouse. There’s still quite a bit of stylization in Knights in Tight Spaces, too, when it comes to characters and its bread-and-butter medieval fantasy enemies. The small stages, however, are attractively detailed and look like complex pen and ink drawings come to life. Character animations and spell effects are well done, if necessarily limited to whatever the card being played suggests.

Card battle games offer endless replayability, with little chance of things getting stale because the combinations of cards in a particular situation are unpredictable. Knights in Tight Places has solid and very enjoyable core systems and mechanics. The combat is fun and the new art style helps sell the new setting. The story was perfunctory but it got the action where it needed to go. If card battle games are your go-to genre, you’ll enjoy Knights in Tight Spaces. If you’ve never played this kind of game, it’s an easy one to start with, welcoming to new players and very satisfying to veterans.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***