Dungeon Diving in FlyKnight or: Why You Should Have a Regular Game Night with Your Friends
Maintaining connections and friendships is difficult.
At the ripe age of 30 years old, I have discovered the Sisyphean task that is keeping in touch with the people you like being around. Shit comes up, people have lives, schedules are difficult to work around. Everyone has a fucking Google calendar. And it’s not like you don’t want to stay in touch and hang out with your friends. Life just gets busy. Add in a good portion of introvertedness and you can go a whole year and see your friends in person maybe once.
The solution? Activitiesâ„¢
Over the past year I have spent far more time with my collection of friends than I had in the past 5 years simply because I got tired of never seeing or hearing from them and set up regular recurring games nights. Biweekly Arkham Horror LCG, Biweekly TTRPGs, monthly-ish RPGs, and a weekly video game night on Sundays. My schedule is jam-fucking-packed some weeks, but I feel like I’m actually in my friends lives again and that’s been refreshing.
I’m at a bit of a spot with the weekly video game night though. We’re not super big on competitive games. They’re not relaxing, and they take away from the real purpose of the session which is to just hang out. So, we’ve been spending our time in narrative games. First was Baldur’s Gate 3, then Divinity: Original Sin 2. Those are long fucking games, and really great ones at that, but now we’re needing to recharge a bit before we jump into something massive again.
Enter: FlyKnight
This week we hopped into the indie game, FlyKnight. FlyKnight is an odd little dungeon crawler where you play as a fly making your way through a dungeon to battle the Lunamoth. As you make your way through the low-poly environment you face greater and greater challenges while finding more equipment as you delve deeper and deeper. The game play is like a mix of Dark Souls bonfire based progression with the first person dungeon crawling of classic Kingsfield (I’ve never actually attempted to play Kingsfield myself, but from my very shallow understanding this game is similar) You can also call in the help of up to three friends, making this a perfect palette cleanser game.
FlyKnight was very short, taking us about 2 hours to complete. But for 7 Canadian dollars, I really wasn't expecting much more than that. Honestly, for the smaller scope of the project, there’s a lot of depth to be found. The atmosphere and music are amazing, and the combat has a surprising amount of variety and nuance as you work your way through the game world. On top of that, the environmental design is amazing. The three different biomes as you dig deeper into the dungeon each have a specific flavour that lends to the story in intriguing ways.
FlyKnight was exactly what I needed. Considering, well, everything happening in the world right now, it was nice to be able to get the gang together to go on a goofy little dungeon dive. I find myself wishing for more little experiences like this with friends. Fantasy romps that allow you and a group to get lost for a little bit. Open exploration, but in a structured way. There’s a lot that can be found for single player,, but what really sets this apart for me was the multiplayer inclusion. There’s some glitchiness involved with that (the fishing was one particularly difficult thing to manage with multiple players), but overall it worked incredibly well.
I feel like indie games like this often go the rouge-like route. Tons of content and replayability, but less in the way of a crafted experience. Rouge-likes can be fun, but in my estimation can miss the mark when it comes to creating really intentional game experiences. I want the developer to take me on a journey, and the developer of FlyKnight, Wabbaboy, has done just that.
In short: Game good.
So that’s it. This is your sign to get your friends together for a game night to go dungeon diving.