Remember when you were a kid, stretching your arms out to each side and becoming an airplane" Zooming around the backyard making noises that amounted to something like “Neeeerrrooowwww vrrrrooooowww"” Playing make-believe is hard wired into our brains from a very early age. In fact, it’s often the very reason we play video games. We’re playing make-believe in a more, let’s say, sophisticated environment, instead of running around in the street as a 28-year old playing airplane. Knights and Bikes is a game that takes players back the roots of their adolescence.
What are the roots of adolescence without a friend" So of course Knights and Bikes is a co-op adventure, and it’s great to see a game with such prominent couch co-op getting this much attention. The two characters, Nessa and Demelza, are on a quest to save their island, and everything is presented in the style of a kid’s point of view. Junk is collected as valuable treasure, bikes are seen as almost horse-like, and of course there are the gnomes. Oh, the gnomes. Knights and Bikes is a visually stunning game from a couple of the minds behind LittleBigPlanet, Tearaway, and Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction, and that history shows. The hand-painted graphics in motion are more stunning than these screenshots can convey. It’s like my childhood imagination is coming to life on the screen in front of me, but that feeling is helped along by the sound eff...