Edited on: October 30, 2025
Posted on: October 30, 2025
Early Access review
Metal Link Solid with no ending
"Good Night Knight" (GNK) looks like SNES Zelda but plays like a procedurally generated blend of it and Merry Gear Solid : Secret Santa.
The gameplay loop is satisfying. Pick one of several biomes to delve into and go through series of enemy filled rooms with elevators every nine or ten rooms. You can take the enemies out in combat or sneak up on them and silently eliminate them one by one. Or just stealthily weave your way to the exit.
Your abilities are tied to what gear you carry. Gear is found in the dungeons at set points or crafted in the safe area if you've managed to magically "Fulton Extract" the specific prerequisite enemy types. Each piece has an Awkwardness Rating that goes down as you use it. You're capped to a limited amount of Awkwardness, but you can lower the rating down to zero for each piece of equipment by sinking XP into it. XP is earned by taking out enemies, and each enemy taken out gives a small compounding boost to the XP future ones drop... which resets when you pull back to the safe area. That safe area is the only way to recover your HP or re-equip consumables, though, so you'll have to return regularly.
So, isolated room clearing action that frequently descends into chaos as you get spotted and your stealth plans go out the window. Push your luck mechanics abound, between deciding when to attempt a monster kidnapping and when to retreat for health or push through for XP. Having all the biomes unlocked by the end of the tutorial means that if things get stale you can move around to a different environment for higher XP / more monster components.
I liked it! You keep components and a fraction of your XP if you die, so even failure runs didn't feel too bad, but there's a constant progress drip as you unlock elevators closer to biome bosses or get new pieces of gear, of which there are dozens. The end game plays nothing like the beginning because of all the new skills and abilities you've internalized by that point.
One big problem though. As of the waining days of 2025, there's no ending to the game. You can beat all the floor bosses, but that's it. The game just keeps going, NPCs cycling worn out lines, after you've beaten everything and unlocked all the equipment. There is a release plan the team put out in 2021 that has uncompleted "before year end" items on it. Per the other major game distributor the team hasn't posted any updates in about four years, and that seems about right from some other 'net scrounging. This is almost certainly a dead project.
It's a shame, because there's enough here that a few extra lines of dialog, an explanation of what actually happened during the mysterious beginning, and a brief epilogue would wrap the whole experience up into a nice, high-four-maybe-five-star game. If you play it, expect something in the 6-12 hour range depending on skill, and be prepared to just walk away once you've hit an arbitrary goal. Unlocking all equipment and killing every boss is a decent place to call it.
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