Solo Knight by Shimmer Games is an idle dungeon crawler starring a snarky-faced little boy who finds himself trapped in an alternate dimension filled with monsters and spirits. He begins his journey alongside his uncle, but our prepubescent protagonist is abandoned early on in his adventure and left to fend for himself.

Our hero traverses the dungeon on auto-pilot, though the player can manually maneuver him by tapping on their screen where they want him to go. There are no stairs or teleporters that transport you to the next level of the dungeon, instead, you automatically advance after defeating a certain number of monsters on each stage. Occasionally, you'll come across boss monsters who are tougher and require a much more hands-on approach if you want to defeat them.

Although Solo Knight fits snugly into the idle battler category, its approach to many of the genre’s tropes can be unorthodox. For one, there’s a mind-blowing depth and selection when it comes to builds and loadouts. Every single item has a utility skill which can affect how you approach combat. One bow type can shoot three arrows in a fan-shape ahead of you, while another has a skill that increases the physical damage of each arrow. The former lets you deal damage to groups more quickly, while the latter gives you the ability to take out tankier enemies with fewer hits. Then, depending on the weapon you choose, you'll want to find and equip the right hat and shoes to complement its strengths. And naturally, the loadout you go with will influence where you allocate skill points on the skill tree.

The skill tree in Solo Knight (which the game calls "Perks") is divided into two primary branches: melee and ranged builds. Each of these branches splits off into several, more specialized branches. Due to how the tree is designed, it doesn't take much to optimize your chosen build. However, the skill nodes for certain builds (e.g. totem fighters and minion buffs for summoners) are entirely inaccessible until you've gained enough skill points to reach their branches. This affects the power curve and viability of many loadouts and stifles experimentation in the early game, but allows for a lot more variety (and fun) once you've gained access to deeper branches.

There's an undeniable joy in finding an item and putting together a skill build to get the most out of it. One issue I had with the Perks system is that once you've invested points into a certain setup, it's impossible to swap to another loadout with completely rebuilding your Perks from the ground up. This can get frustrating in the later stages where certain enemy types are naturally weak against some weapons and stronger against others -- if you have a poor build for the enemies you're facing in a stage, switching to a new build takes way too long.

One strange aspect of the grinding in Solo Knight is that you can't farm monsters for experience. If you die at a boss, your character respawns on the previous stage where they'll be trapped to kill the same monsters until you tap the button to fight the boss again. I made the mistake of using all of my unused equipment to upgrade my primary weapon, and found myself stuck losing to the same boss without the ability to change my loadout. Monsters can still drop items, but you'll need to collect quite a few if you want to upgrade them to a high enough level to progress. Grinding in a free-to-play idle battler is a given, but it's particularly frustrating in Solo Knight due to how the weapons and Perks work.

The IAPs in Solo Knight allow you to obtain  higher tiers of weapons, but again, they don't offer much of a boost to your damage output unless you're building specifically for them. In fact, the only way to progress in this game is leveling up and equipping items that synergize well together. You can purchase Gems to unlock new gear, or buy in-game currency to fund weapon upgrades, but you won't get far without the right Perks or combination of items.

Solo Knight is a fun little idle battler that suffers from balancing issues. Its fascinating weapons system and huge skill tree allows for an incredible depth of choice in viable builds. Ironically, this same system that you'd think would encourage experimentation actually prohibits it due to how specific each skill branch is for each item. Trading a weapon out for another also requires a complete upheaval of your current Perks, which makes for a frustrating grind every time you want to change things up. If you don't mind the grind, Solo Knight is a fun indie idle battle RPG to sink some hours into.

By Andi Nuruljihad for Gamesforum