Box Knight: Friday, five o'clock, you put on the cardboard and go break management

One of the best roguelites of the year. Fine, it is August, and I have four months left to contradict myself.

Still: a cardboard knight liberating an open-plan office should not have worked this well.

The best idea is in the calendar

The premise is an office joke. The company has fallen into darkness, a toxic culture has turned the employees into creatures, and you clean the place out floor by floor until you face the CEO.

Except there is a design detail I find brilliant, and it looks like nothing: by day you are a normal office worker, and you become the Box Knight when the clock hits five on a Friday. You climb the tower, you beat the boss or you die trying, and you start again the following week.

That is the roguelite loop mapped onto the working calendar. Dying is not a failure, it is a Monday. Starting again is not a punishment, it is another week of work. I had never seen anyone line up the structure of a genre with the subject of their game quite this cleanly.

And the knight's official secondary mission is delivering beers, wine and non-alcoholic beverages to colleagues in need. There, now you know whether this game is for you.

The cardboard, and what it licenses

Making a knight out of cardboard is not only a good visual joke, it is a permit.

Cardboard licenses exaggerated animation, pieces flying off, executions that spray without ever becoming unpleasant, because it is packaging being cut up. The art direction owns it completely: the studio talks about grotesquely cute enemies and executions that are both gory and silly, and that is exactly what you get.

It is frankly disgusting at times. And because it is all cardboard and bright colours, you laugh instead of wincing.

The enemies are abstractions of your least favourite co-workers. The studio names the Drone Goblins specifically, and if you have ever worked in an office you know precisely who they mean.

Combat, and the detail that stops it being brainless

Fast, legible, easy to pick up. You cut through room by room with a range of weapons, special attacks and executions.

But there is a layer on top I was not expecting to find: enemy types work on a rock-paper-scissors principle. Each adds an element, or a combination of elements, that forces the Box Knight to change how they play.

Which means you cannot cross a room with the same reflex as the one before. That is what stops a brawler becoming a game where you hold one button for twenty minutes.

The rest follows the genre's grammar, well executed. Every run differs, the dungeons are generated, and the better you play, the better your chances of unlocking short-term upgrades for the current run. You try different builds: the brawler who absorbs and hits hard, or the fast operator who strikes and vanishes.

The Council of the Janitors

That is the name of the permanent progression, and somebody had to think of it.

When you fall, it is the cleaning staff who pick you up and permanently improve the Box Knight's attributes. The studio sums it up in a phrase I am keeping: there is always a reward in death.

In an office building, making the janitors the sole holders of knowledge and repair is a social joke, and it is the best one in the game.

On the difficulty

It is well judged, and I am going to be precise because that is rare.

This is not an easy game. It is not a hard game either, and above all it is not a game trying to prove anything. It offers exactly the amount of resistance needed for a win to count, without ever turning an evening into a chore.

A few bosses had me restarting several times, and it was the good kind of restarting: the kind where you understand what you missed instead of raging at the game.

There is an age at which you no longer have anything to prove to a video game. This one understood that.

And the co-op is on the same sofa

Here is the point I want to press, because it has become rare and it deserves flagging.

Box Knight offers co-op in split screen, on the same machine. Not only an online mode: two controllers, a sofa, one screen. It also supports remote play together for people who are not in the same room.

A daft, bloody action roguelite is built to be played next to somebody. Half the pleasure comes from the person yelling when you grab the upgrade they wanted, and that half does not travel through a headset.

So a word for studios making roguelites: keep the sofa. An unremarkable online mode is something everyone offers. Two players on one screen getting in each other's way is what people remember.

What I take away

There is full customisation, helmets, uniforms and weapons, and the studio frames the question in exactly the right terms: what is your Box Knight brand? Even the customisation screen makes a joke about the company.

This is a game under thirteen euros that knows exactly what it is. It does not claim to revolutionise the genre, it does not hide what it borrows, and it never takes itself seriously for a second. Those are three qualities people underrate.

I spent far more time with it than this review required. That is the only indicator that does not lie.

Thanks to We Made A Thing Studios, then, for the little mid-year gem.

Do you play the brawler or the shadow? Come and compare working weeks on the InsertCoins Discord.