Thanks to Ratalaika Games for the review code

Title: Peasant Knight
System: PS4
Price: $2.99
Release Date: 03/19/2019

Presentation

Going for a very overdone eight-bit art style, Peasant Knight’s presentation is unfortunately on the low end of the spectrum, with little in the way of anything worth nothing. The spritework looks generic, the music is obnoxious and the level designs are almost all straight lines with little of note save for a change to icy terrain halfway through the game.

Gameplay

Peasant Knight is an autorunner that’s pretty self-explanatory. You automatically run and can jump with the X button, while also being able to stop yourself by pressing up on the d-pad. Besides the option to restart using the triangle button, that’s the entire game’s control scheme, and the game is just as simple as the controls.

The main goal of each stage is to carefully avoid all the obstacles and make it to a portal at the end. At first the game starts off simple, as it should, before it gradually throws more obstacles at you. Enemies, false portals, fire pillars, among many other hazards will stand in your way, along with a persistent one in the form of thunder that will strike the knight if he takes too long on a stage.

With such a simple control scheme, there’s really little these hazards offer outside of throwing another hurdle to jump over or avoid carefully, for the actual levels don’t offer much besides going one direction and reaching the goal. Sometimes you’ll be sent backwards and have to think of a clever path upwards, but mostly you’ll just be stuck on boring linear paths with little of importance.

I kept on playing and playing until stage fifty or so to see if the levels would do anything cool or interesting, but outside of some annoying segments with moving platforms and the introduction of ice halfway through the game, there was nothing that kept my interest save for some boss battles where you have to loop around the stage a few times to “beat” them, and even these aren’t that interesting enough to make me want to play much further.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Peasant Knight is a boring, generic mess that didn’t really engage or entertain in any way. There is a local multiplayer mode, but I was so bored with the single player mode that I didn’t want to put my best friend through sleep-inducing gameplay to make an effort at it. Considering how the platinum trophy for this game can be earned by only beating half of the game (even though the overall game isn’t too terribly long and it wouldn’t have hurt to make it actually require 100% completion), it also feels as if the publisher wants you to run away from this mess, and I feel that if the levels were a lot crazier and had some cooler obstacles like in the Runner games, or if they were more than straight lines, the game would have been a lot better, but in the end I feel that you could get a much better experience out of a title like Runner 3 instead.

Somehow, despite the low price and easy platinum, this was a game that made me feel just as empty as the moments before I even opened it for the first time, and that’s pretty sad considering how many simple yet fun autorunners exist in this crowded market.

I give Peasant Knight a 3 out of 10.