VERY cute and fun little dungeon crawler with a timeless style.
The gameplay has a bit more depth than it first reveals imo. The game begins as a very simple zelda-style dungeon crawler where you wander through procedurally generated levels defeating monsters to reach the elevator and proceed to the next level. You're pushed through simple linear missions that offer little in the way of complexity. As you progress you'll find yourself spending more and more time in the "Arcade" mode, which focuses exclusively on procedurally generated random levels with random encounters and monster types. Each of the four ever-changing gates in Arcade are home to a boss at a given depth. These bosses offer some of the best areas to farm as well as the best rewards. Much of the late game combat revolves around a sort of bait and punish style of combat, it's very methodical but also satisfying. Many of the common weapon archetypes feature advanced mechanics like animation cancelling or weapon swapping to increase DPS.
The style here is also incredibly well done. It blends a lot of ideas from both fantasy and sci-fi without becoming generic. There are typical fantasy style enemies in the form of skeletons and slimes but there are so many more designs that are quite inspired (even the slimes and skeletons find a way to stand out from the typical fantasy archetypes they're derivd from). Whether it's the adorable spookat or the irritating gremlin mender, they all have something unique to offer that I haven't seen represented in any other game. The music is incredible, I really can't do it justice by praising it in words. Harry Mack absolutely crushed the sound design for the game. Each UI element offers a very satisfying bloop or beep, the hit sound effects are crunchy and everything heavy and mechanical has a real weight to the sound. Back to the music, it's synth forward while also being rather symphonic. Harry Mack is a composer and that is shown clearly in his work here, the arrangements are complex and show a wide range of instrumentation that you might not see in more modern titles. Xylophones and marimbas are mixed with heavy synths and electronic drums, even menacing organs find their way in depending on the atmosphere of the area.

Now, the game isn't all sunshine and rainbows, it has more than its fair share of downsides. The first and foremost worst aspect of this game is how easily progression can be skipped by simply paying your way through. There are two core currencies; crowns and energy. This immediately sounds reminiscent of the worst offenders in the f2p space, there are countless games which offer a paid currency and a free, earnable currency. Luckily this is not the case here, at Spiral Knight's heart is a player-driven economy, and at any moment you can transfer crowns into energy and vice versa. This isn't without its problems though, as while this means anything that is purchasable in the game can be earned with crowns; the opposite is also true, anything that can be earned in the game can generally be purchased with real world money -converted into energy, then crowns-. At the very least, this is a better place than it was in when the game launched. Many reviews from that era will cite much worse problems, but gone are the days of forced limited progression and being punished for grinding the game.
The build diversity in this game is also a major lowpoint. Nigh everyone you find will be wearing one of two armor sets: The Black Kat set or the Chaos Cowl set. These lower your resistances to most ailments in exchange for a sizeable damage increase or an additional movement speed increase with the Black Kat set. The damage increases from these sets are massive in exchange for essentially guaranteeing a death if you're inflicted with the wrong ailment, but most of the time that winds up being a worthy tradeoff with how scarce ailments can be if you play well. To make the limited arsenal worse, weapons are also fairly unbalanced. Weak weapons are nigh unusable compared to their popular counterparts. You will likely be spending 90% of your time in the endgame using a Blitz Needle and a Combuster/Glacius. There are viable alternatives, and there's enough variety in the current form of the game to offer enough novelty that the game doesn't ever feel fully stale, but it does make you wish all of the weapon designs had their chance to shine (the Turbillion is such a fun weapon design!).

All in all, please give this game a shot. It will run on literally anything, and it has a lot to offer if for no other reason than experiencing a heavily stylized, beautiful world.

thank you for the free TF2 hat back in 2017.

i dont know if im bad at the game or the enemies are insane