Ghost Knight: A Dark Tale combines old school design with new school difficulty

I’m a simple guy. I see something that looks like another thing I know and like, and I will pay attention. That’s especially true for old school gaming classics like Castlevania, or in this case Ghosts ‘n Goblins. Capcom already brought the series back with great success a few years ago, but when cruising for cool Steam Next Fest demos I found a small (like, one person) indie dev’s take on the formula, called Ghost Knight: A Dark Tale. It has an impressive feeling of polish for such a small project, and some interesting ideas on how to add to this formula. But it may be a little overthought.

If you’ve ever played Ghosts ‘n Goblins or Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, a lot of the basics here will be familiar. You play as a little knightly dude, and throw spears (or axes, or other hidden weapons) at ghosts and zombies, among other macabre critters. There’s a lot of intense platforming, and plenty of level design traps built to test your reflexes, spatial awareness, luck, and in this case even resource-management. There seems to be a little bit of a story about a fallen kingdom and the corruption that caused it, but the demo didn’t really get into it.

Ghost Knight is hard. It’s very hard, and getting through the level in the demo took a lot of time and effort. But it doesn’t totally hate you, and there are built-in mechanisms to keep you playing and progressing through a stage. For starters, there are checkpoints placed throughout the level, and you can also heal yourself in a similar manner to how Hollow Knight does it. Both of these things require orbs that are dropped by enemies and found in chests or other destructible objects. The orbs aren’t super scarce, but when you die you do drop a portion of them for potential retrieval later.

These are nice features to have, if only because unlike Ghost Knight’s inspiration, this level is quite long! Normally challenging video game gauntlets like this involve shorter levels even with checkpointing. A longer stage means more endurance is required from the player, which can be a big ask. It even feels, combined with some stuff we'll get into, harder than Ghouls 'n Ghosts in some ways. Thus, the checkpoints. A couple other choices Ghost Knight makes seem more bold, but these ones feel like a comfortable fit.

One interesting choice is a stamina bar, and a very specific mechanic that might clash with the rest of the flow. The stamina bar is for throwing weapons out, a massive shift in a game like this. There are spots where enemies are either standing in hard-to-reach places or constantly spawning. Either one requires fast and plentiful shooting, in a way that fits the vibe. But having to manage stamina is a substantial layer of additional challenge. There’s also a moment when you land from a jump that prevents you from shooting. This especially comes up in moments when you’re running across sinking platforms. There’s usually a zombie on the next stop, which takes two hits to defeat. It’s easy to shoot over the zombies’ heads, but both your character and the zombie are short. So often I would think I was aiming right to keep my momentum going, then get stuffed because my feet hit the ground and the game said “no more shooting” in that moment. I wonder if that one will make it to the final game or not!

While the jury's a ways out on some parts of it, I did have fun with Ghost Knight: A Dark Tale’s demo. The cartoony horror vibes, complete with appropriately cutesy, but spooky music, are on point. The difficulty is definitely a barrier to overcome, and I think there’s more complication than I expected to the mechanics. That could result in a bit of that “artificial difficulty” feeling in response, which is never a good sign for something invoking Ghosts ‘n Goblins. Those games are all about rules and mechanics informing the stage design and vice-versa, so adding more stuff to such a careful balance is risky. Still, I’d happily play more so see what else Grimware Games has cooking.

Ghost Knight: A Dark Tale has a tentative 2025 release window for PC. We played the demo available on Steam for this preview.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.