Review: Future Knight (Switch) - Channels The Spirit Of Tiger Handhelds To Great Effect

Don't worry about your grandma. She can live with me, be my maid.

Do you remember those Tiger handheld LCD games, extremely limited and mostly rubbish, that you used to love so much? Future Knight’s styling is exactly, and uniquely, that: its foreground sprites crisp, black and inky; its backgrounds lucent, pastel-hued imprints. Charming, minimalist, and proudly weird, you control Future Knight, a fictional '80s cartoon hero, who must defeat The Lady of the Past — a bewildered old grandma who seems to have accidentally created a cult and erased the brains of everyone on earth.

A joint project between Studio Koba (Narita Boy, Haneda Girl) and Aeternum Game Studios (Aeterna Noctis, Eden Genesis), the Spanish developers cite the late Satoshi Kon (creator of Perfect Blue) as inspiration; Future Knight captures the eccentric nature of Paranoia Agent and Paprika, and its superb cutscene renderings, humour, and to-the-point dictation make for a surprisingly engaging narrative.

The game takes place over eight 'biomes', each broken into short substages, and each representing one hour in the countdown to doomsday. It grants you all you need without overcomplicating matters. You can run and shoot, lock to fire in various directions, dodge-roll, and melee attack in close-quarters. Future Knight is quick enough, but ungainly with his jumps, making certain areas out of reach.

This opens up the game’s second dimension: Two More, a ‘tumour’ blob-like character ejected from Future Knight's husk with a button press. While Future Knight is immobilised, Two More can stick and climb walls, has a set of limited attacks, and is often required to navigate tight areas, retrieve collectibles, or make jumps before you teleport the two back together. It’s not an original idea, but it's comfortably baked into Future Knight’s shooting action, and the limited health and power afforded to each character creates tense risk-reward moments.

While stage layout isn’t the most imaginative, Future Knight’s craftsmanship is evident in shootouts and boss skirmishes. One of the hallmarks of good action game design is when you, the player, can make the combat look good — and that rings true here. While it's a tad slow for an arcade-style game, implementing your toolset to take out an ever-evolving roster of enemies and increasingly inventive bosses is good fun.

Break-rolling through bullets is essential, as is timing your melee attack and being aware of cooldown periods for certain manoeuvres. Screens of enemies are arranged to require on-the-fly strategy: dodge here, fire there, bite through that guy running left of screen and rapidly destroy that overhead menace. While it doesn't reinvent the genre, it's assembled well enough to feel rewarding. You’ll be saved by overly-generous checkpoints early on, but will need to hone your skills later to avoid lengthier restarts. Two More ejects when Future Knight goes down, and if you can hold out for a few seconds amidst the chaos, reuniting them will grant you a fresh life bar.

There’s obvious effort in Future Knight and it’s visually very creative, especially when it toys with ideas around its mock LCD display and LED lighting. While it’s not boldly original gameplay-wise and more variety would have helped, it certainly feels unique thanks to its design work and oddball energy. If you’re looking for an arcade fix with real personality, this will serve you well. Note that, while it’s perfectly playable in handheld owing to the softness of the backgrounds, the wonderfully rendered sprites do pop better on a bigger screen.