Freezing Knights
A light co-op turn-based RPG
Take control of two knights and try to reach the end of the perilous snowy mountain paths by avoiding enemy attacks and powering-up your characters.
Features
● Single-player and two-player modes
● 14 music tracks by @ohhcurtains
● 30 enemy encounters
● 11 unique enemies (+1 ???)
● Customizable character builds
● Multiple paths
● Optional hard mode
● 🐔🐔🐔
Controls
Keyboard
Xbox controller
Soundtrack
Many many thanks to @ohhcurtains for composing the amazing extensive soundtrack for it and providing great feedback!
The full soundtrack (+9 bonus tracks from other games by @ohhcurtains) is available for download here:
https://ohhcurtains.bandcamp.com/album/freezing-knights
About
Freezing Knights is my first real attempt at creating a game and took about 7 months to develop. It is split between 14 carts and was mainly inspired by that one RPG series with two plumbers 🐢.
It originally released as part of the Twelve Days of Pico-8 Christmas 2022 event.
Also available on itch.io and Newgrounds.
Credits
Music and OhCurtains intro by @ohhcurtains
Testing / Feedback: Arthuria, Partybird, @ohhcurtains, SmellyFishstiks, paraK00PA
Source code
The full source code is available under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license: https://github.com/tinyevilwizard/FreezingKnights.
Changelog
Version 1.1.0 - January 1, 2023
- Added skip tutorial option
- Decreased tutorial length
- Increased great sword damage
- Increased great sword price
- Updated color of unavailable items in rest menu
Version 1.0.3 - December 16, 2022
- Fixed Knight B losing the sword when entering a rest area
Version 1.0.2 - December 15, 2022
Yoooo! This is incredible! The gameplay, the gfx, the music by @ohhcurtains! I only had a few minutes to play this morning but this looks like a new all-time favorite on the platform for me. Thanks so much for sharing!!!
First up, this is an amazing game, and I gave it a gold star. The adorable units, both friendly and enemy, are the front for some incredibly timed attack patterns that seem impossible at first, and then you master them. They specifically remind me of a 1990 game called The Immortal, especially its notoriously precise final boss. The resource management is really well thought out, making you stress over every decision to chug a healing potion or hope you can last a turn without them. The way the corruption overruns the map gives additional urgency. The music is glorious.
Playing through on Normal difficulty, I fought the Elite Corrupted Guardian boss, and it seemed right on the edge of my abilities to evade. When I took it down with two healing potions remaining, I breathed a sigh of relief. Your game's pacing felt as impeccable as the rest of the design.
Also, regarding the story implied in the environment?
This is great. I'm still grinding through it but the tutorial is wonderful to go through the first time and get the basics. Well done integrating that. Music is bitchin' and everything feels nice and tight so far. Gonna be playing this one for a bit I think...just hope it saves my progress!
I played this with a friend, and had an absolute blast! Great job, great game!
We also had the bug where I lost the sword after the second boss.
The great sword was a great help in mid game, then kinda became useless with both of us having upgraded sword, only doing 4-ish more damage.
Also, I feel the ending could have been a tad cooler. More payoff for this 1.5-2.5 hour game.
Anyway, again, amazing game, lots of fun!
Every time i beat an encounter a red bar that says download failed comes up and the game won't load I've beaten the final boss twice and can't get the ending due to this
I had a really good time with this! The art and music are fantastic and the combat was fun also, with a good amount of enemy variety. I'm sort of mixed on real-time reflex-based systems in turn-based RPGs but this one works pretty well, and it does mean if you screw up your upgrades you can still win with persistence.
On that note, the one snag I ran into on my playthrough was related to the upgrade system. I sort of overlooked the health upgrades and didn't end up purchasing any until the last campfire -- I usually tend to favour offensive/ability upgrades because they give me more options. I did buy a couple potion upgrades but no HP ones. Because of this I really struggled with the section just before that point -- it seemed really hard with tons of difficult to avoid attacks that nearly took out all my health on a single hit. At some point I realized I probably should have bought some health upgrades, but reloading my last save it had already saved my last purchases so I couldn't change out the upgrades. Not wanting to restart the whole game, I powered through it to the last camp fire, but it took me many many tries.
Once I got there I realized the health upgrades are by far the most cost-effective upgrade in the game and I had really put myself at a disadvantage by not buying them. If you consider a character's total health pool is HP X Potions, it means the HP upgrades are about 5x as cost effective as the potion ones, since they add +5 HP and potions only add +1 potion, both values starting at 10 (HP upgrade is also half the cost but only affects one character). So the HP upgrade is way way better but the game doesn't really communicate this at all (it says increased HP, but not by how much). And since it's sandwiched in between the potion upgrade and weapon upgrades I think my brain just kind of skipped over it at the beginning.
Anyway, it's a minor quibble and I had a lot of fun playing. The game is very polished and has great style and it must have been a ton of work to make, so congratulations @tinyevilwizard and @ohhcurtains on the achievement! Great work
This is such a fantastic game. The music and graphics are top notch. The game mechanics are great. Some bits are really hard but after a but of perserverance they can be overcome. Strangely I didn't find the last boss as difficult as some of the other enemies.
My winning strategy was to upgrade health and attack as quickly as possible and equip player 2 with a sword. Arrows seemed to become less useful in the later part of the game. Never did get a chance to buy the fire stick even though I ended up with 200+ gold.
Really, really, good game. So ambitious but so well executed.
Great game! In fact the best RPG I ever played on pico-8! the music by @ohhcurtains is amazing the actual gameplay itself is fun and very replayable. If there was a top 30 pico-8 tier list this game would be in it. For me, this game is top 10. I love that you added a 2 player option. My only criticism is that there was a settings menu to change the controls.
Thank you!
@birdmanisking There is an option in the main menu to swap [O] and [X], which also swaps the jump buttons for the knights. Not sure if it's something like that you had in mind?
@Earthybread Late response, but this looks to me like a problem with the Lexaloffle server. I remember encountering it once last year.
To anyone encountering loading errors like this with the carts, the only thing I can really do is recommend trying the itch.io or Newgrounds versions instead.
Released version 1.1.0!
- Added skip tutorial option
- Decreased tutorial length
- Increased great sword damage
- Increased great sword price
- Updated color of unavailable items in rest menu
The full source code is also now on GitHub under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license: https://github.com/tinyevilwizard/FreezingKnights
I found this through the Pico Playtime "favorite PICO-8 games of 2022" youtube video, and I've been really enjoying it-- the battle defense 'minigames' are all so crisp and different, there's so much boss variety, and the soundtrack is an amazing complement to the game. I can tell a lot of polish went into it, so thank you for creating this!
(I've now made it to the final boss but without enough potions to make it past-- will have to try again)
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