I'm giving this game a recommendation but I'm never going to finish this damn game. It is too good to deserve a thumbs down, so I must call it conditionally recommended.
Fight Knight is two really clever games glued together. On the one hand, it's a first person grid based dungeon crawler with constant puzzles. Time isn't wasted chasing down dead ends for pointless loot, every inch of every dungeon is SOME form of puzzle feeding into each level's gimmick. Almost no other game in the genre, not even fricken Zelda is this intent on making sure you're always having to think about something while travelling the dungeons. The other half is in the random battles. The random fights are essentially Punchout, action first person punching where every enemy has a different moveset and, with each enemy formation, typically they interact in ever tougher ways, keeping the pressure on you in different ways and with different gimmicks. You have specials, charged punches, and a turbo button so you don't have to mash to do your Kenshiro impersonation. The fights all serve to bleed your health and supply of health potions. If you die, you lose all your progress to the last save, so there is a bit of risk/reward of trying to push on to the next shortcut versus retreating out back to the base camp to save. Gluing all this together is an endlessly charming artstyle, excellent writing that is comedic and charming without a hint of sarcasm, and really good music.
The problem though, is that the mix here goes together like oil and water. The separate parts of Fight Knight are simply too good but do not complement each other. The dungeons loop back into themselves, opening constant shortcuts and have absolutely zero sense of flow. I have trouble remembering in which room the last shortcut opened between deaths! Heaven forbid I take a few days off from the game, I'll NEVER figure out where the next part of the dungeon I need to explore is. It's all clever and lovely and just far too clever. Then you start looking over massive ice sliding mazes or block pushing puzzles of multiple steps and while SOME rooms will disable random encounters, in others I can still be hit by three or four of them before finishing a single segment. And the game does not let up. Later enemies start getting obnoxious counter abilities or are able to just completely block you from hitting them outside of stealing maybe one or two hits after a series of parries or a lucky charge attack fired blind. It gets to the point where "Okay, I have proven I can beat these guys just let me finish this puzzle." But nope you have to keep fighting these aggravating assholes forever. A game over is catastrophic, not so much in lost time but now you have to remember all the new shortcuts you opened and where you need to reenter the map.
All that said, I still have to recommend Fight Knight for the person with a stronger stomach than me. Fight Knight is just really good. Everything that went into it oozes heart, soul, charm, style, and clever application of game mechanics. There is not a single part of this package that is bad. It is just that the mix of all the mechanics creates really aggravating interactions that make it way tougher to play than it really should be.
