Each to their own, but my favourite moment in Monty Python and the Holy Grail comes when King Arthur confronts the Black Knight, in order to cross a tiny bridge. The scene initially sets up the Black Knight as a terrifying adversary through some not-half-bad fight choreography, before he faces off against Arthur and… well, surely everyone’s seen this at some point, right?
Endless Knight is a new PC game built around the limb-lopping humour of this scene. Your expectations should be realistic: this is not a Street Fighter competitor, or even something you’ll play for an especially long time. However it is amusing, charming, and includes local multiplayer.
The combat system is built around four moves, which in most cases seem to echo some of the scene’s action, which are blocked in four different ways. There’s also a taunt button, but that’s about it. So this is essentially Simon Says, except getting it right or wrong results in either limb loss or straight-up death.
How much fun you can wrangle from this probably depends on your fondness for the Black Knight. By far the standout feature here is that you can continue fighting after losing limbs, and whatever you’ve lost will affect your knight’s moveset. So lose a leg and your kicks become comedy hops, and your strikes lose distance. Lose both legs and you’ll be controlling an upper body stump on the floor that can still slo-o-owly swing their sword. I haven’t quite managed to get to the ‘bite yer legs off’ stage of losing all limbs, largely because you usually die quite quickly.
Endless Knight is completely aware of what kind of product it is, full of self-deprecating asides about its own excellence. But it arguably achieves what it set out to do, which is to make a silly game about a silly joke. It goes further in some respects, too, including neat little bard songs between singleplayer levels, and a range of arena edgings that provide amusing ways for defeated players to ragdoll.
The game is a fiver on Steam. Whether it’s worth that depends entirely on just how funny you find this kind of thing, and whether you have a mate who might enjoy the same – it’s a novelty price tag for a novelty game, and one good multiplayer session would easily justify that.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, bringing you original reporting, game culture and humour from the British isles.
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