Summary
Back in 2022,Steamintroduced Replay, a feature in the vein of Spotify Rewind that shows what you spent the most time on throughout the preceding year. I imagineElden Ringdominated the year for a lot of people, but mine was led by a game calledKnightfall: A Daring Journey, an exceptionally silly medieval take on thepopular battle royale genre. I’m sinking a lot of time intoElden Ringnow, but even though I haven’t touchedKnightfallsince 2022, there’s a good chance it could claim the throne once more.
I picked upKnightfallwhen it dropped on April Fools' for one very simple reason — it was free. That was only a limited launch promotion, however, and anyone who missed that window had to pay $5.99 to grab a copy. It’s still a very reasonable price, buta paid online game in search of a consistent community needs updates, whichKnightfallonly received for the first few weeks after launch. Past that point, it was a game adrift, and finding a full lobby to play against became essentially impossible within several months.
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Knightfall Is Going Free To Play On Steam
The Medieval Meme Game Could Pick Up Players Again
Two years afterKnightfallconfirmed the end of support, however, a newSteampost announced thatthe game is permanently being made available for free as of July 02, 2025. To be clear, that’s free with no strings attached.Knightfallhas never had any form of in-game monetization, and there still aren’t any updates planned for it. As long as the servers stay up and the community remains active, it’s a theoretically limitless source of fun.
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Beneath its fundamental goofiness as anabsurd medieval meme game,Knightfallis actually an incredibly smart approach to making a great battle royale experience. Instead of an arbitrary ring of death closing in on a map, it’s a race to a castle at the center, with teams of two doubling up on horseback. Night is deadly on the roads, so stopping in settlements to resupply and hunker down is necessary. When several duos enter the same settlement for the night, however, there’s a good chance that only one will race forward intact at dawn.
Getting to a settlement first makes it easier to grab supplies and take the high ground, rewarding skillful maneuvers on the road.
This setup creates a ton of inherent momentum and an interesting cyclical gameplay structure, but the reasons I love the game go way deeper. I got the news aboutKnightfallgoing free from a friend who served as my most steadfast teammate during the game’s window of popularity, and the experiences we had with it at the time are ones that I’ve never been able to find elsewhere. When he messaged me about it, he called that period the greatest months of his life, and the sentiment behind that hyperbole is largely sincere.
Horse Drifting Makes Knightfall A Special Battle Royale
Manipulating Knightfall’s Mechanics Makes It Better
True to its status as anApril Fools' joke game,Knightfall’s greatest mechanic is also its silliest. The horseback racing all takes place on narrow, winding roads, and veering off into the grass quickly slows things to a crawl.Taking tight corners at high speeds is dependent on drifting, which applies physics that feel straight out ofMario Kartto horses that splay their legs and slide like there’s no tomorrow. It’s a lot of fun to mess around with, and my friend got into the habit of drifting in place while waiting for dawn to come before launching out of town gates backward.
The beauty of drifting comes in the form of skips, which render the slowdown inflicted by grass irrelevant. In some cases, it’s just faster to drift across a gap than it is to take the proper road, something that we picked up from another duo when we were first learning the game. In others, it’s possible to careen into a rock at the right angle to launch into the air and clear major distances, drastically reducing the time that it takes to ride between one location and the next.
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The several months that we spent inKnightfallwere largely characterized by a sense of discovery.As we honed our drifting skills, new concepts for consistent skips would start to seem viable. Although there’s a good chance that many of the skips we figured out were discovered independently before us, we would frequently try something new and then see it popularize over the course of the next few days. It was a beautiful quirk of playing way too much of a niche online game, and getting good at skips helped maintain the fun in running the same courses repeatedly.
Knightfall’s Problems Don’t Hamper My Excitement
A Lack Of Updates Is A Blessing & A Curse
Knightfall’s lack of support does come with its drawbacks, which might be more apparent after being made free than ever before. There’s one interesting trick we figured out that works against the spirit of the game, and although we only ever did it a couple of times for this reason, plenty of other players have employed it and will continue to. The game also doesn’t feature any anti-cheat solutions, so ruining the fun for others can be unfortunately easy.
In spite of these potential problems, I couldn’t be more excited about returning toKnightfall.There’s a magic to its mix of simplicity and potential for mastery, and the lack of updates also comes with some upsides. I don’t have to worry aboutKnightfallaltering features that I love in favor of a competitive meta or trying to drag me in for daily play with a battle pass. The game’s worth playing because it’s fun, and very little stands any chance of getting in the way of that.
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I don’t know how longKnightfall’s popularity will last this time, but I hope it can pick up a community onSteamfor more than a few months. While nothing may be able to compete with the initial eureka moments, I could happily play the game for years to come, and I want more people to experience the same joys that I have.Knightfall: A Daring Journeymay never have the hype or community that the most popular battle royales enjoy, but I have no doubt about which take on the genre I want to come back to time and time again.
