Knights in Tight Spaces - ★★☆☆☆

Knights in Tight Spaces is the follow-up to Ground Shatter’s 2021 game Fights in Tight Spaces. Fights was one of many, many games that took noticeable inspiration from Mega Crit’s seminal hit Slay the Spire – Slay the Spire has a lot to answer for, in that regard – but that’s a topic for another time. It was one of the more unique takes on the format: Ground Shatter’s attempts to do things somewhat differently lead to Fights shaping out as a worthwhile game that offered something new, rather than one that left players wondering why they shouldn’t just play Slay the Spire instead.

Image: Ground Shatter

• Knights in Tight Spaces

  Developer: Ground Shatter
  Publisher: Raw Fury
  Release: 4 March 2025
  Retail Price (Steam): 19,50€/$19.99/£16.75

Knights in Tight Spaces takes the ideas introduced in Fights in Tight Spaces and looks to build upon them. It comes with some fairly significant mechanical changes – more on that later – and eschews its previous, minimalist art style for a highly-stylised, hand-drawn aesthetic. I think the game looks wonderful: everything has been animated beautifully, and the graphics and UI are clean and easily readable. On appearance alone, I’d happily sink hours into Knights. Unfortunately, we don’t play games for their appearance alone, and when it comes to gameplay, it’s difficult not to feel let down.

The headline mechanic introduced in Knights is the party system. In Fights you were a lone wolf, a one-man-army fighting your way through hundreds of enemies; in Knights, you have the benefit of bringing a couple of friends along for the ride. Those friends – and indeed your own character – can be one of eight different archetypes, from the melee-focussed Fighter through to spell-slinging Warlocks and Sorcerers.

The most exciting idea – and Ground Shatter know this – is to have a trio composed of three completely different characters: their cover art has a Warlock, Rogue and Knight (which, funnily enough, is not actually a class in the game), you’re greeted with a similar team on the game’s start screen, and every promotional video or image you can find will have some assortment of archetypes: hunters paired up with fighters, or sorcerers working with brawlers and rogues. In theory it sounds wonderful: in practice it’s anything but. 

Image: Ground Shatter / IndieLoupe.com

The deck shared between all your characters severely punishes variation in your lineup, as the most influential cards all come with a prerequisite to play them. Want to play that fireball? You’ll have to use your attuned character. Tackle an enemy? Better have your weaponless character in range. Knock that skeleton off the board with a heavy arrow? It’s a shame your archer can’t get a clear shot on him. Having a diverse group should provide an advantage in this sort of game, but trying to accommodate all of them within one team is nigh on impossible. Doing so results in dead turns: if you’re lucky enough to draw the movement cards required to reposition your lone useful character, you spend half your momentum (action points) doing so, leaving you with little left in the tank to actually deal some damage.

It’s difficult not to draw parallels with Marvel’s Midnight Suns, a title that also falls into the category of “mission-based game where you take a group of three heroes and draw cards from a shared deck, playing them to defeat enemies in a small area over a small number of turns.” I have my own problems with that game, and its triple-A status puts it firmly outside of our ‘loupe’, but the difference there is that movement is not a restrictive part of the game – any one of your heroes can attack any enemy regardless of position. Therefore the shared deck is considerably less of a hindrance: Spiderman isn’t going to be made useless by being stood in the wrong part of the map on the turn where you draw a handful of his cards.

Image: Ground Shatter / IndieLoupe.com

As having a range of archetypes feels so unintuitive, players are forced into sticking to one style: everyone having bows or melee weapons or no weapon at all, or everyone being “attuned” – the game’s word for “magic”. That way, at least all your characters can use all your cards. When stuck within these confines, what feels like it should be funnest is the last of those options: stacking your team with Sorcerers, Clerics and, if you’re of a mind to play the game enough to unlock them, Warlocks. 

Unfortunately, the magic feels underwhelming at the best of times: the spells not quite dealing with enemies as well as smacking them with an axe does, with your Sorcerer running away and splashing a fireball against a heavily-armoured opponent to deal next-to-no damage. Eventually you’ll run into a Paladin – which is just a regular enemy, not a boss of some description – and it’ll make all your spell cards cost more, and put you at an almost insurmountable disadvantage. There’s no hard counter to other strategies, but for the game to effectively force you into having a one-dimensional party, and to then turn around and tell you “whoops, looks like you needed some non-magical cards for this fight” feels terrible.

Image: Ground Shatter / IndieLoupe.com

I could go on. All the fights feel somewhat dragged out, and there’s no option to speed through them: you’ll even occasionally hit a ‘survival’ mission that asks you, as the name implies, to stay in the fight for nine or ten laborious turns. You’re often presented with bonus tasks that are impossible, such as making sure a hostage doesn’t take 12 damage when there’s nothing you can do about them being hit for 14 on the first turn. There’s other tasks that, should you wish to accomplish them, mean kiting a final enemy around the battlefield until you draw just the right cards to shove them off of it. When you replay the game, the storylines, sidequests and all, are seemingly identical. The locations too, begin to appear time and time again. After a while, it’s all just so samey. 

You rarely want to dilute your deck by accepting the cards offered at the end of each fight, though I can’t complain too much about that, at least, when it’s symptomatic of the vast majority of roguelike deckbuilders (including, to be entirely honest, Slay the Spire) – but I do wish one would implement something that didn’t make the prevalent strategy to pass up almost every card offered to you. What adds to this problem in Knights, however, is repeatedly being offered duplicate cards in your packages - after each fight you’re offered a choice of three cards, and it’s not uncommon for two of those to be the exact same card. 

Image: Ground Shatter / IndieLoupe.com

Some of these problems were present in Fights in Tight Spaces, but many feel compounded in Knights. Part of that is the fact that so many of the cards have been carried over from the original game, albeit with a lick of paint: they’re the same cards that weren’t much use in the original, only now made even less useful by the class system. There are new cards that are unclear, and a support attack mechanic that doesn’t seem to work when it should.  

I started this review by saying that Fights in Tight Spaces was one of the few roguelike deckbuilders that didn’t leave me wondering why I shouldn’t just play Slay the Spire instead – Knights in Tight Spaces had me wondering why I shouldn’t just play its predecessor. It’s a nest of clunky, problematic design that it feels like it requires a major overhaul to live up to its promise Maybe one day it’ll get that, but for now it’s a disappointing sequel that feels like a missed opportunity. Knights in Tight Spaces is awarded ★★☆☆☆ by IndieLoupe.com.

The reviewed product was purchased by IndieLoupe.