From studio Twirlbound, who brought us the open world and fairly unknown Pine, comes a brand new adventure with not a mighty knight, but his apprentice – a knightling. Here’s our review for The Knightling, tested on Xbox Series X!
That’s new to me
I consider myself moderately knowledgeable about most relatively high profile videogame releases that come out nowadays – kind of a necessity, if I want to be useful as a reviewer, as I need to keep track of what’s coming out, what are reasonable candidates for our limited resources (we can’t cover every game that comes out, obviously), what looks interesting. I’ll be honest, I had no clue about what The Knightling was, or that it was coming out. That surprised me a bit, becuase publisher Saber Interactive is hardly a small name in the industry, being behind games like Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 and the Mudrunner series.
Thus, me missing out on a fairly big-looking third person open world action adventure feels odd. No idea what caused this blindspot of mine specifically, but the second the opportunity arose to review it, I took it because I liked what I saw – making me think of, among other things, the rather underrated Immortals: Fenyx Rising. That game, in turn inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, has a colourful somewhat cartoony look, a massive open world with various cool biomes, a slightly farther away camera that makes it feel almost more of a platformer than a traditional third person action adventure… all these elements can be found in The Knightling, sure, but it’s got more ammo at its disposal.
No hero, but trying to be one
Sir Lionstone is a knight of legends. Strong, fierce, yet with a heart of gold. His incredible battles against the forces of evil are the stuff of legends, in the middle of town a giant statue commemorating one of his most epic victories is looked in awe by hundreds of people every day. His apprentice is… quite the opposite. It’s hard to even call him a proper apprentice, because he is yet to even start to fight. He’s mostly just running errands for the knight, accompanying him on various seemingly safe adventures just to see and learn something perhaps.
One such adventure ends in surprising fashion, as Sir Lionstone has to chase down a legendary creature that nearly killed his knightling. The young apprentice’s life was saved via the knight throwing a shield in front of him, just moments before an otherwise deadly attack. Now, our young protagonist has to take the shield home and give some worrying news – the legendary knight is missing, some dangerous creatures that were thought to be lost are lurking underneath the city, and on a more personal level: our knightling has no clue what to do now.
Mini adventure
With this premise, it’s easy to find our protagonist relatable, as suddenly the weight of a giant responsibility falls on his shoulders. Oh wait, that wasn’t the responsibility: that’s Sir Lionstone’s massive and magical shield which, after some repairs, is now being used by our new hero – even to fight, as it turns out! It’s a tool of many uses: it can be used as a melee weapon, as a throwing item that can damage foes, hit targets and then comes back like a boomerang – and even to slide around in for faster traversal. Fun!
Indeed, the game’s open world is not all that big in terms of horizontal extent, but there’s a good density and variety to platform our hearts out. The main city Clesseia is huge, packed with secrets and loot. The outskirts present all sorts of platforming challenges, coves of enemies, side missions and more, with a surprising amount of verticality presented even in the relatively open fields of the various biomes encountered. The unique shield aside, except the usual barrage of moves: combo-based attacks, a good bit of platforming with rather high jumps, with then a skill tree to slowly unlock more and more moves.
Familiar fun
It ain’t gonna win awards for originality, but the formula works. The worlds are bright, colourful and packed with details. There’s many talking characters with charming dialogue, rendered even funnier by the fact that every member of the population wears some sort of mask – professional or improvised, which ends up muzzling their voices into incomprehensible speech. The punchline of this is that, in the rare occasions we find someone without a mask, their speech is perfectly understandable, as they’re then properly dubbed.
That’s just one of the many funny little quirks of this cute little adventure, which is what I like to call a bite-sized open world – the sort of game you can easily complete in 15-20 hours, in stark contrast with behemoths like Assasin’s Creed Shadows which take several times as much. It can take even less if you concentrate on the main missions alone and keep the difficulty setting low, but it’s worth exploring and doing side missions – both for the quirky humor and game mechanics, and because of the decent skill and look customization, with plenty of extra skins, hair options and shield styles to slowly unlock.
A charming adventure for some rainy afternoon
In what is setting up to be one of the most packed couple months in videogame history, it is hard to perhaps recommend focusing on The Knightling first and foremost. It won’t have the inventive, variety, depth or length of various other soon to be released titles. Its relatively limited budget is felt in many ways, with various invisible walls, flawed collisions and more to slightly hamper the experience. Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Twirlbound’s open world adventure, as its cute visuals, on point humor, infectious sympathy and solid gameplay loop kept me more than intrigued enough to keep pushing on, with the end credits rolling before the game’s relatively limited scope would start hurting. Keep an eye out for this one, as it’s a pretty fun ride.
The Knightling is available from August 28th, 2025, and it’s playable on PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch.
The Knightling
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Solid gameplay loop
- Busy and exciting open world
- Charming humor
- Just the right length
CONS
- Mostly unoriginal game mechanics
- Combat lacks depth and variety
- Some visible corners cut for budget reasons
