Knights of the Throne

What it is

Knights of the Throne is a compact, old-school 2D RPG built around a simple premise: Lasha, the last leader of a once-celebrated order of knights, is called out of obscurity to gather a party and protect her kingdom from a threat the store page never bothers to name in any more specific terms than "an army of enemies never seen before." The developer, the small studio Anima Games, is upfront about its influences on the store page itself, describing the game as being "in the vein of Skyfall and The King's Heroes" — both modest, budget-tier fantasy RPGs rather than genre landmarks, which is a reasonably honest signal of the scope to expect before a single screenshot loads. You assemble the expected four-person party — a healer, a mage, and two fighters — and set sail between a handful of shrines that function as self-contained dungeons, each guarding a blessing needed to push the story forward. Sidequests and optional bosses pad out the otherwise linear structure, and an auto-save function and mouse support round out a feature list that reads like a checklist of "things a budget RPG should have" rather than anything more ambitious.

That modesty is, on its own, not a criticism — plenty of well-loved indie RPGs succeed by doing a small number of things competently rather than chasing scope they can't support. The question this review has to answer is simply whether Knights of the Throne is one of those games, and the honest answer is that the public record barely exists to check against. Nearly three years after its 24 July 2023 release, the game has exactly two all-language Steam reviews. Both are in English, both are read in full for this review, and they disagree with each other almost entirely.

Two reviews, two verdicts

The positive account comes from a player who logged roughly 7.4 hours and sums the experience up in one line: "It's a nicely balanced game. A good option if you want to play some and not get too involved." That is a real endorsement, but a specific and modest one — it praises the game for being an easy, low-commitment way to spend an evening, not for depth, challenge, or surprise. Taken at face value, it lines up neatly with everything the store page promises: a small, contained, unpretentious RPG that doesn't ask much of the player.

The negative account tells a considerably less flattering story, and does so with far more detail. The reviewer describes the standard party of "the usual healer, mage, 2 fighters" setting out to "save the world (yawwwnn)" by visiting shrines scattered across what they call "a very small" world — small enough, they note, that getting lost simply isn't possible. Their core complaint is about combat: fights are "boring without any variety," with each dungeon offering at most two distinct enemy types, and no real cost to using any ability against any foe — "very nice to use firespells on fire enemies," they write, pointing out that there's no elemental resistance system worth respecting. They also flag that enemies attack party members at random rather than targeting whoever is weakest or most threatening, a detail that matters more than it might sound: it removes one of the few decision points — who to protect, who to heal first — that turn-based combat usually relies on to stay interesting once the numbers get repetitive. Their closing line is blunt: "I could only recommend this game if it is on sale. Full price is a clear stay away from it!"

One detail is worth being precise about rather than smoothing over. The negative review states a total playtime of "4 hours and 7 minutes," explicitly marked "(offline)," while Steam's own tracked playtime figure for that same review shows roughly 2 hours and 15 minutes — a gap the reviewer's own parenthetical suggests is time spent playing without an internet connection, which Steam's playtime counter can undercount. Either figure describes a short game rather than a long one, and both reviews agree on that point even where they disagree on almost everything else: this is a handful of evenings' worth of RPG, not a sprawling campaign.

What a two-review sample can and can't tell you

It would be dishonest to pretend two reviews, from two players with very different reactions, adds up to a confident verdict either way. What can be said with more certainty is what surrounds those two reviews: Knights of the Throne's own Steam news feed has zero posts, at any point since launch, which rules out the possibility that a rocky start was patched into a better game later — whatever shipped on 24 July 2023 appears to be exactly what exists today. There are also no Steam achievements to check for a completion curve, which elsewhere can hint at how far a typical player gets before dropping off; here, that data point simply doesn't exist, and the review is stating that gap rather than guessing past it. Combined with the total absence of developer or publisher activity elsewhere for a follow-up title under the Anima Games name, the picture is of a self-contained, one-and-done budget release rather than an ongoing project.

Reading the two available accounts side by side, the negative reviewer's greater specificity — named mechanical complaints about AI targeting, enemy variety and elemental balance, versus the positive reviewer's more general one-line praise — gives this review reason to weight it slightly more heavily when setting a score, without dismissing the positive account as wrong. A short, easy, unchallenging RPG genuinely is exactly what some players want on a quiet evening, and the one player who left a positive review found precisely that. But "nicely balanced and undemanding" and "boring without variety" can both be true descriptions of the same shallow combat system, viewed from two different sets of expectations, and the negative review's account of randomly-targeting AI and trivial elemental matchups describes a design that would wear thin for most players well before the game's short runtime is over.

Verdict

Knights of the Throne delivers a small, competently structured old-school RPG shell — a sensible party composition, a compact world that never risks overwhelming the player, sidequests and optional bosses for anyone who wants a bit more, and quality-of-life basics like auto-save in place at launch. What it doesn't deliver, on the evidence of its single detailed critical review, is combat with enough variety or tactical bite to reward more than a handful of hours' attention, and its own silence since launch — no patches, no news posts, no second wave of reviews — suggests that shell is final rather than a foundation being built on. Fine as a cheap, short, low-stakes RPG to fill a quiet evening if it turns up in a sale; hard to recommend with any confidence at full price, given how thin and divided the only two accounts of it that exist actually are.