Knight’s Retreat Review

Knight’s Retreat is a fantastic quirky chess puzzle title developed by Minimol Games and published by QUbyte Interactive.

You have to rearrange your troops to bring the Knight to a certain area on the board but you are unable to backtrack.  It is definitely a game where you have to be familiar with how chess pieces move. The game doesn’t really teach you what each piece does so you will have to know a bit about it before diving in. As you progress through the levels, more pieces will show up that you’d find on a standard chess board.

Just for reference for those not familiar with chess, the Knight can only move in an “L” shape and is probably the most unique piece. As you progress more mechanics are shown, like a button you have to press to finish the level or having to move more than one Knight to a winning square.

You have 80 levels to play and as you’d expect the further you progress, the more difficult they become. You can easily undo and go back if you make a mistake, though I prefer to just start fresh.

It’s OK if you are moving the other chess pieces that are on the board as they can move back and forth without any punishment, but your Knight can only move forward. Once they’ve left a square, that square is no longer able to have ANY piece on it.

You get a good sense of progression as in the early levels the puzzles are simple and have a slow learning curve, plus they slowly start to add different mechanics and teach you how to do them without going difficult straight away. It is always about planning your moves going forward and trying to work out how you going to move your Knight which is just how chess is meant to be, thinking ahead to you are going to do. A hint feature however would have been useful.

The visuals are bright and colourful and it has some really lovely relaxing music that helps actually keep you calm. It fits the theme perfectly. It’s so relaxing and a refreshing change of pace as I have played many different types of puzzle games.

Conclusion

Knight’s Retreat is great. If you enjoy chess and puzzle games it’s a no brainer, pick this title up. It’s challenging, and has some brilliant mechanics. At only £3.29 as well, it’s a steal.

This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox One console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.