FlyKnight Screenshot
Image: Wabbaboy

When I backed Sorceress (a very promising Dark Messiah-ish immersive sim) on Kickstarter, I never expected that solo developer Wabbaboy would get sidetracked with a side project, which all of us backers would get for free. Spawned from distraction, FlyKnight is a great little first-person dungeon crawler set in a subterranean world of bug-people, heavily inspired by FromSoft's classic King's Field series and with an aesthetic riffing off old-school RuneScape. My only complaint with it was that it was relatively short, albeit at a price point to match.

That one gripe evaporates today with the release of the Enhanced Edition update. The game now has a heavily remixed, harder New Game+ loop with new enemy types, overhauled bosses, and a Miyazaki-pleasing "proper poison swamp", effectively doubling the length of the game. On top of that, there's item and enemy randomizer modes to shake things up further, and a few new weapon types to master. Obviously it's not going to make this into an enormous Forever Game (remember, it WAS a small side-project), but you're getting a lot more bang for your six bucks. Check the full update notes here.

If you've never played it before, this is also a very good time to start. While mostly inspired by the King's Field series -the precursors to Dark Souls - FlyKnight introduces a few elements from other games, including the limb-chopping action of the little-known (and now fan-translated) Shadow Tower Abyss, with directional attacks able to remove body parts from enemies and disable many of their meanest attacks. There's also surprisingly robust loot and itemization for a game that was (until today) around three hours long. And there's online co-op!

There's been a whole raft of King's Field-inspired games recently. Lunacid, Verho, and Dread Delusion are all high recommendations from me, and I'm especially looking forward to Hark the Ghoul and Queen's Domain, but if there's one you should pick up today, it's FlyKnight, which might be twice the size now, but is still a wallet-friendly £5/$6, with a 30% discount to accompany the new update. Even cheaper if you've got Verho, too!