Soul Knight Prequel First Impressions: Will Lightning Strike Twice?
If you've ever had the unexpected desire to play an 8-bit pixelated dungeon-crawling exploration Chinese indie game (and you know you have), you might have heard of a weighty tome called Soul Knight. Originally released in 2017, this game made waves among fans and critics alike for its vast roster of characters, fast-paced action, and massive array of armor and weaponry. With the upcoming release of Soul Knight Prequel, developer ChillyRoom wants lightning to strike twice. With the beta available for testing, opinions are already flooding in before launch. What everyone wants to know is if it's as worth downloading as its predecessor.
Soul Knight Prequel is just as the title suggests: a prequel to Soul Knight set in a past with less powerful technology. Unlike its predecessor, Soul Knight Prequel deemphasizes the "shoot 'em up" aspects of the game for classic RPG elements. Collecting items, building skill trees, and customizing your hero are all factors you'll find here. But like its predecessor, as soon as I tapped start, I was greeted with some groovy retro pixelated artwork and funky music involving horns and drums that got me excited for an epic adventure.
From the beginning, there were four classes to choose from: warrior, archer, thief, and pyromancer. Like most RPGs, each class comes with its own benefits and skills. I decided to be a thief, whose main attribute is dexterity, specializing in evasion and burst damage. The good news is more classes should be available when the game officially launches. The character customization is simple but quite involved nonetheless. I could pick dozens of variations on hair, face, and hair color, and although skin type wasn't available, I still thought it was a nice range of options for having three customizable features.
There are two modes to choose from when starting Soul Knight Prequel: story and adventure. While adventure mode sets you right in the middle of your home base, Chillstead Village, where you can start accepting missions immediately, story mode adds context and narrative to the battles. Being a fan of narratives myself, I chose story mode. Suffice it to say the story is...simple. For starters, I named my character "Aaron" to reflect my given name, so when I met the other NPC "Aaron," I was immediately confused about what was going on!
This isn't exactly the developer's fault, but it was confusing nonetheless. The basic premise of Soul Knight Prequel is that the Sophoract, an item that maintains peace across the continent, has been sabotaged by an unknown perpetrator, and the curators Archknight and Archwizard have gone missing. With your companions, your mission is to find the curators and the missing pieces of the Sophoract. It's a classic MacGuffin narrative, and it comes up short compared to many more complex stories being told by peers in the genre. Nevertheless, it works just fine as an excuse to raid dungeons and slash away at monsters.
And what fun slashing away at monsters was! The arsenal of weaponry available at my fingertips was truly massive. The list included crossbows, swords, staffs, dual-handed blades, and scrolls, just to name a few. The game’s action-oriented, fast-paced interface lets you hack away at enemies, thankfully there’s plenty of variety in the types of monsters you can defeat. Monsters are zone-specific, so I fought flies and frogs in the swamps while battling gnolls in the steppes. The game also features an in-game clock, so maps transition from day to night. All these fun features add to Soul Knight Prequel's combat and character-building systems.
The character progression offered by Soul Knight Prequel is pretty deep. After defeating enemies, I gained EXP, which I could use to level my character. I was able to increase three main stats: strength, dexterity, and intelligence. Being a thief, I made sure I wore lots of DEX-boosting equipment. Each piece of equipment also carries an item skill, which can boost your character immensely, so you'll want to take note of the skills that can be activated in combat.
Soul Knight Prequel also offers skill trees based on your character class and filled with active and passive skill sets. All active skills can be set to the skill wheel, which I could quickly toggle through in battle. At level five, I was able to add a second skill tree to my thief, and I chose archery. At that point, I was kicking ass. The combat animations for each skill were generally entertaining and kept me engaged in the battles. Another factor I appreciated is choosing which items to pick up after fighting instead of them randomly being added to my inventory while running over them.
Aside from the combat, Soul Knight Prequel offers around fifteen playable areas that are unlockable once your character is at the appropriate level. The zones I adventured through weren't the largest I’ve seen in games of this type, but hopefully, new areas will be added before the official release.
Beyond adding more content in the form of classes and zones, I hope that ChillyRoom takes some time before Soul Knight Prequel’s release to review the game’s text. I noticed plenty of typos while playing—not enough to take me out of the story, but cleaning things up definitely would make the narrative clearer.
Still, I had a lot of fun testing this title out in this early form. With the added benefit of creating and hosting your rooms, it looks like Soul Knight Prequel will be able to support multiplayer. Fans of the first game are going to want to give it a download. It was enough to keep me engaged between the fun combat, skill tree progression, and card collection system. Most of what fans loved from the original makes an appearance here, with some new benefits. And though it’s not perfect, I plan on giving Soul Knight Prequel more of my time when it launches.
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