Indie Hotness: Knytt
Poor Knytt was abducted by an alien who flew to a distant planet, crash-landed and wrecked the UFO. Both survive, but Knytt must set out on an adventure of exploration to fix the spaceship and return to his home planet.
This simple platformer is a beautiful example of simplicity in form, evoking feelings of nostalgia and familiarity of 8-bit games. As you play through the varied atmospheric environments, memories of previous adventures through previous platformers spring to mind such as: The Mario series, New Zealand Story, and Kirby. Although when I looked at the Knitt site, I noticed that the developer claims to get his inspiration from Shadow of the Collosus and ICO. Which makes sense from this side by side comparison. Knytt definitely shares the feelings of isolation from Shadow of the Collosus.
This is a great little free platformer for Windows systems, and those fancy new Macs that run Bootcamp.
Toots
Posted to Video Games on 8 December 2006
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: independent, indie, knitt
I believe this is the guy who also did “Within a Deep Forest”, which is another very interesting platformer.
Holy crap, I thought I was the only who had ever played New Zealand Story
sorry but this seems a little close to the edge of pretty lame. copying elements from other games pretty much verbatim and then creating an itemized list of each instance? how artistic and original. wtf mate who cares. i have to play the game now, but i will get back to you.
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Wasn’t there supposed to be a NZS for the DS this fall?
Roger: There’s honestly only a few references to those games I really like (I clearly didn’t try to hide that they are references). The rest is original.
Anyways, I just want to explain or defend my standpoint a bit further :)
Seiklus inspired me graphically (solid colored areas, and the importance of shapes rather than texture)
Cave Story inspired me with a color palette I really liked.
SoTC gave me the idea of the pinpointer, and the background atmospheres in the game.
The only direct reference is the castle, which is a paraphrase of the one in Ico, created as a tribute to my favorite game.
If you think it is wrong, remember that practically everybody does it. Super Mario Bros defined the concept of a whole lot platform games, and still do. I suspect that Warcraft and Starcraft borrowed more than a few ideas from Dune 2 and Command & Conquer. Introversion’s game Defcon obviously have more than one thing common with the movie Wargames from the 80’s.
The thing is, I wanted to give some credits to the games I enjoy most. Although it may upset some people that I didn’t invent everything myself, I’m not ashamed of it, nor do I try to hide it.
I definitely loved Knytt. I played it so much, I didn’t really study for my exams.
The music is well placed and adds to the atmosphere and the small ambient sounds add rather than detract. Not to mention the fact that it’s relatively small and can be run off a flash drive. Entertainment at work!