Developer: We Made A Thing Studios
Publisher: We Made A Thing Studios
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Box Knight – Review
As much as we enjoy reviewing video games, we live in a time when actually doing it for a living is very, very difficult. For this reviewer, the words you’re reading are part of an elaborate side gig. In the real world, we’re your average nine-to-five office worker. As such, office life holds few secrets for us, so when a game promises a satirical take on what we spend most of our time doing, you can be sure that we’re paying attention. Enter Box Knight, a game that could end up being more relatable than we’re comfortable with…
Story
Welcome to Unicorp, a lovely place to work… or at least, it used to be. A corporate takeover transformed your once peaceful office into a dark, toxic workplace. Former coworkers and higher-ups have mutated into grotesque monsters. Only you, the Box Knight, can put a stop to this. You may be an ordinary office worker by day, but once the clock hits 5:00 PM on Friday, you don makeshift armour crafted from recycling bins and wield cardboard tubes as weapons. It’s time to make your way through the office departments where corporate-themed monsters await, and eventually challenge Unicorp’s CEO himself! Box Knight’s story leans heavily into office life satire and corporate tropes, though don’t expect the game to be too scathing and on-the-nose. The office setting is more of a quirky setting, enabling bosses to have such illustrious names as Trevor from Finance or Anton from Digital Marketing, rather than actually critiquing modern corporate greed.
Graphics
The bright, hand-drawn cartoon art style emphasises the light-hearted nature of Box Knight’s story. The overall aesthetic of the game is that of an adult animated show in the vein of Futurama or Rick and Morty. Visual designs blend office equipment with fantasy tropes, with lots of little details to discover as you make your way through the office building. A particularly nice touch is the wide variety of cosmetics with which you can customise Box Knight’s appearance. As much as we enjoy Box Knight’s art direction though, the game does leave some things to be desired when it comes to visual performance. Whenever the screen becomes flooded with enemies, damage effects, and numbers, the frame rate goes down, and stuttering becomes annoyingly prominent.
Sound
Upbeat rock music accompanies the action. It’s fitting for the premise of the titular Box Knight rebelling against his boss, and matches the overall fun tone of the game. Sound design features cartoonish sound effects, such as sploosh and crackle noises when enemies pop or explode. Stabbing with spears, swinging cardboard swords, dodging and ground-pounding are also all accompanied by satisfyingly crunchy noises. Our only gripe with Box Knight’s soundscape is the lack of voice acting.
Gameplay
We’re not sure if roguelike beat-’em-up would’ve been the first genre we’d associate with a game about satirising office work, but that’s exactly what Box Knight runs with. After picking your initial weapon, elemental power, and armour, you embark on a run through randomised office rooms and departments. Each room requires you to get rid of a wave of enemies. Upon room completion, you’re presented with an Employee Evaluation, which grants stat upgrades depending on your performance. At the end of a run, a high-ranking employee is waiting for you to face them in a boss battle. Should you be defeated, you’re taken back to Unicorp’s safe space, a hub area where you turn in completed to-do lists, earn experience, and buy permanent gear or skill upgrades before tackling another shift.
For a game with such a straightforward gameplay concept, Box Knight’s combat is surprisingly fleshed out. Your moveset includes the expected jumps, dodges and both light and heavy attacks, of course, but also ground pounds and execution moves. The elemental power you choose at the beginning of a run provides distinct abilities: Raging Storm offers massive, screen-clearing damage while Endless Frost freezes foes, for example. Health recovery relies on chugging beer, which leaves you temporarily vulnerable while you’re drinking. Supplementing all of this is an extensive passive skill tree, which sees you gradually get stronger over repeat runs as you increase things like damage output and drink capacity. All in all, Box Knight is a standard but solid take on the genre, elevated by its fun visuals and humorous setting.
That said, there are significant difficulty balance issues here. While early runs start easy enough, the difficulty has a tendency to spike as higher-level enemies spawn much earlier in subsequent runs. It’s easy to become cornered by swarming hordes. Thankfully, difficulty can be adjusted, though we would’ve preferred it if this didn’t feel like an absolute necessity. The game is fairly short too, though its roguelike nature means that there is at least some incentive to revisit it, especially if you’re a completionist. Achievements like taking out 5000 enemies with different weapon types should keep you occupied for quite some time. There’s also a couch co-op mode, in case you feel like sharing the workload. For €14.99, it’s certainly an enticing offer, though we wouldn’t use PTO just to play this one.
Conclusion
Rough around the technical edges, and soft around the satirical ones, Box Knight is an enjoyable beat-’em-up romp but little more than that. There is definitely something to be said about the game’s audiovisual presentation and the humour it pushes, but we do feel like more could’ve been done here, both in terms of social commentary and when it comes to the roguelike gameplay. If you go in expecting a fun little palate cleanser, you might just make it until the end of your shift with Box Knight.
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