Review: Knights in Tight Spaces

It's you, two knights, and an archer in a cramped room, just how you like it. You're starting to relax, given it's your third time going through this exact fight. You force an enemy to move towards your warrior, slice him and his friend with a sweep attack, and advance towards the small knight. With a Front Kick, you pushed— what do you mean "cannot be pushed?"

You tough this was the small knight? What a shame. Maybe you should have taken the time to check. Oh well, nothing to do but to pass the turn and immediately get pushed out a window. Sorry, you died! You should have rotated the camera, you know, to make sure there wasn't a window there. If only you had activated advanced camera mode, we wouldn't be back to the start of the game. Oh well, just get through the first chapter again, and you'll be swimming in fun new scenarios in no time. See you in a couple of hours!

Knights in Tight Spaces Review (PC [reviewed])
Developer: Ground Shatter
Publisher: Raw Fury
Released: March 4, 2025
MSRP: $19.50

Knights in Tight Spaces is a turn-based tactics roguelike with near-perfect information and deckbuilding elements. It also features party management, map exploration, a story that isn’t procedurally generated but feels like it is, and a striking art style that does nothing to support a game so complex.

Knights in Tight Spaces (KITS, from now on) starts simple: you control a single character, outnumbered about one to ten. This is the core KITS experience, born as it was from the one-against-many Fights In Tight Spaces. Each turn, you draw a hand of cards that represent actions like movement or attack. You play those cards by spending energy and try to deal as much damage before retreating in a safe spot.

To help you overcome the odds is a healthy dose of too much information and some classic roguelike improvements (or is it a roguelite?). At the start of each turn, you’ll learn who and how the enemies will attack, which ones react to your actions, and even where reinforcements will spawn. Between each fight, you will be offered cards to add to your deck, new pieces of equipment, or additional party members.

Knights in cramped spaces

Things start simple, and they stay so for a long while. It's easy to understand why: as soon as fights become a little more complicated, every system in KITS begins crumbling under its weight, starting with the art style.

I like the art in KITS, especially the maps. With their detailed dioramas on abstract watercolor backgrounds and one-tone character models, they create an immediately iconic style that's stunning in motion as well as in stills. The character models don’t do as well with their monochrome tint, but you could argue that this choice makes them stand out from the board. And you would be wrong.

One of the first problems you’ll notice when playing KITS is how hard it is to tell one enemy from another. We’ve already gone over the importance of using the perfect information you’re gifted at the start of each round, but the game doesn’t make this easy. Some of it, like health and damage, is readily available, while some is hidden in the extended description that pops out when you rest your cursor on an enemy. And some enemies, thanks to their monochrome palette, are indistinguishable from one another. Is this the archer that ignores shields, the one that does double damage against shields, or neither? That is a real question you will ask yourself at the start of every turn when there’s more than one archer on the board.

The pretty colors and nice framing of the diorama come at a cost, and it’s not just convenience that bears a price. Most fights happen in tight spaces, as you’d expect. Often, this is the corner of a small room. However, the game really likes how its rooms look when they’re hovering in the center of the screen, with no empty space on its sides. It likes it so much that you can’t pan the camera to where the action is by default and have to stare awkwardly at a tiny corner of your screen the whole time.

Even when you enable panning by ticking the advanced camera mode in the menu (a thing that should not exist) you can only reframe a scene once you’re so zoomed in, it doesn’t matter anymore. You can’t uncramp those knights. Why? My best guess is that it looks better this way, but that’s not a good reason. Those scenes come out beautifully in screenshots, but that only makes it harder to explain how awkward they are to play in.

So, what is Knights in Tight Spaces about?

KITS promises a wide range of options for a roguelike tactics game. A glance at the excellent turn-based strategy game Into the Breach tells us this genre doesn’t need so much variation, but surely it won’t do any damage either, right?

At a point, variety starts looking like hesitancy, a reluctance to commit to what works. Is this game about positioning, enemy manipulation, and shoving people out of windows, à la Tactical Breach Wizard? Or is it about optimizing my party and triggering support combos? Being a roguelike, KITS tries to be all this and more, just not at the same time. But while they are presented as equal options, not all those strategies are so interesting to warrant a dedicated 4-hours long run.

This is another aspect that is bound to be divisive. When played on medium or higher difficulties, KITS is quite brutal. Runs can end with one wrong move or a single misclick. Nothing bad about that — except the misclicks, I could do without those. But what if an average run after the second was four hours long? What if the mandatory prologue/tutorial alone took one hour to complete each time? That would certainly change things.

Don’t worry; KITS’ prologue only takes 30 minutes. No, it’s the first chapter that’s an hour long and is just as mind-numbingly easy. The problem isn’t dying after four hours of progress; it’s being hit with an hour and a half of busy work every time you start over. It wouldn’t be so repetitive if the combat scenarios weren’t the same each time or if they were more memorable. As it is, they are indistinguishable from the sea of procgen roguelikes, without any of the benefits. And while the early game isn’t challenging, you must take it seriously if you want the equipment and deck upgrades necessary to survive the mid-game. It gets very repetitive very soon.

A handcrafted roguelike

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of procedural generation in KITS, and even randomness is quite limited. As we just saw, there are some good reasons why roguelikes often employ those techniques. While the tighter design of bespoke fights could have been its selling point, it didn’t work out well. But how does the rest of the game fare under this no-randomness decree?

Discrete dialog for every interaction, a story that isn’t made of randomly assembled beats, and combat scenarios that represent what’s going on in the story; all of this is in the game, but none of it is very good. What could have been KITS’s strength is one of its worse weaknesses. Dialog is the worst offender, not just because it’s always the same but because it feels trite the first way around, too. The barman is detached but worried, the bandit leader is arrogant, and the spy is wise but shady.

The impression given by a character's title and image describes them as much as their words do, so why even talk to them? Like them, the first impression given by the game is correct. A lot of potential was consumed by an overambitious, unfocused project.

[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]

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