One boss fight and nothing else. Your heart is the hitbox, the knight throws everything it has, and you weave through it with the arrow keys. Normal if you are sane, hitless if you are not, endless if you have nowhere to be. Keyboard first, so plug one in.
What it is
Device Knight is one boss fight, built as a fan tribute to a well-known indie role-playing game, and nothing but that fight. A black screen, a pixel-font title that calls itself a simulator, and a menu: Normal, Hitless, Endless, Single Attack, Practice. Pick Normal and a party of three faces a large scribbled white knight on the right of the screen. On your turn you pick fight, act or item for each character. On the knight's turn a small box appears, your heart sits inside it, and everything the knight throws has to be dodged with the arrow keys.
How to play
Arrows move the cursor and the heart, Z confirms, X backs out, R restarts. Attacks are a timing minigame, a marker crosses a bar and you press at the right moment for each character. Then the box appears and the attack patterns come. Normal is the plain fight. The other menu entries say what they are for: Hitless for a no-damage run, Endless with a sub-menu for the whole fight or one of four phases, Single Attack and Practice for drilling. There is a Gear / Items entry on the menu, and the game keeps your loadout and settings in the browser between visits.
What makes it different
A training room rather than a game. Everything that is not the fight has been cut, and what is left is tuned for repetition: a restart key, a practice mode, a setting that turns bullet cooldowns off, a bullet multiplier slider and a cooldown slider, so you can make the fight harder than it was ever meant to be. The intro has a few seconds of red and white screen smearing before the battle starts. There is a touch buttons option in the controls menu for playing on a phone.
Why it is on Bored
Sometimes the best part of a long game is one fight, and here that fight is on its own, in a browser tab. It is for people who already know the patterns and want to run them until they are clean, and for people who want to see what a bullet-hell boss looks like without playing the game it came from.
Tips
- Press R to restart the moment a run goes wrong
- Start with Practice or Single Attack, Normal throws the whole fight at you
- The controls menu has sliders for bullet count and bullet cooldown, 1x and 100 percent are the defaults
- Music and effects volume are separate sliders, both start at half
- Screen shake is one of the saved settings, look for it in the settings menu
FAQ
Is Device Knight free?
Yes. No ads, no consent dialog, no account and no scripts from anyone else.
Does it work on a phone?
Sort of. The game is built for arrow keys plus Z and X, and a touch buttons setting puts Z and X on screen, but it is a keyboard game first.
Does it save my progress?
Your gear, items and settings are kept in the browser. Nothing about a fight in progress is.
Does it have sound?
Optional. Music and sound effects have separate volume sliders in the settings.
Does it end?
Normal is one fight, won or lost. The Endless entry on the menu is there for looping it.
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