Knights Rubbish

Knights Rubbish is a cooperative platformer fighter game set in a fantasy world, featuring characters literally risen from the trash. Players can choose from five hilarious heroes, including Keshia Erasia the discarded eraser, Wendy Floopy the obsolete floppy disk, and Ranawato Plato the philosopher’s abandoned plate, each with their own unique backstory and combo skills. The game boasts photo-realistic graphics created from real photos and offers local co-op arcade gameplay across five levels, providing approximately two hours of adventure as these discarded items seek purpose and excitement in their new lives.

Knights Rubbish: Review

In the vast, often overly polished landscape of indie games, a peculiar artifact occasionally surfaces, challenging our very definitions of art, ambition, and entertainment. Knights Rubbish is one such artifact—a game so bizarrely earnest in its conception and so transparent in its limitations that it transcends mere failure to become a fascinating case study in solo development, artistic experimentation, and the unyielding chasm between vision and execution.

Introduction

Every generation of gaming has its cult curios—titles remembered not for their commercial success or critical acclaim, but for their sheer audacity and idiosyncrasy. Knights Rubbish, a 2018 cooperative platformer fighter from solo developer Yu Chao, is poised to join that hallowed pantheon. It is a game built on a foundation of real photographs, populated by sentient stationery, and driven by a lore so deeply, tragically absurd that it must be experienced to be believed. This review posits that Knights Rubbish is neither a good game nor a bad one in any traditional sense. It is a poignant, unintentional masterpiece of lo-fi ambition—a digital collage of half-realized ideas that stands as a testament to the creative spirit, even when that spirit is utterly, hilariously lost.

Development History & Context

Knights Rubbish is the brainchild of Yu Chao, operating under the banner Shine Right Studio. As detailed on the developer’s blog, the project began not as a concerted effort to create a marketable product, but as a series of technical experiments with the Godot Engine. Godot, a free and open-source game engine, has long been a haven for indie developers and hobbyists, and Yu Chao’s journey is a classic example of its use case: a developer tinkering with mechanics (in this case, a platformer’s “bare bones”) only to see the project balloon into something larger, and far more unwieldy, over the course of “a year and couple of months.”

Released into Steam’s Early Access program on December 6, 2018, the game entered a marketplace saturated with highly polished indie darlings and retro-inspired gems. Its development was marked by the quintessential struggles of a solo creator: Yu Chao openly admitted on the Steam page that the game was not fully play-tested, especially its local co-op mode, and that the planned ten heroes were cut to five due to developer burnout. The game’s “photo-realistic” aesthetic was born from practical necessity—Yu Chao believed using processed photos would be quicker than learning to draw—but this too proved to be a “time-consuming and more tedious” process than anticipated. The game was last updated over six years ago, forever frozen in its incomplete Early Access state, a digital ghost ship adrift on the Steam store.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

The narrative of Knights Rubbish is where the game first reveals its uniquely deranged heart. This is not a simple story of good versus evil; it is a sprawling epic of abandonment, existential dread, and the search for purpose amongst the discarded detritus of modern life.

Each of the five selectable “Knights” is a piece of rubbish with a surprisingly detailed and melancholic backstory:
* Keshia Erasia: An eraser abandoned by his owner, Bobby, after a tragic trip on a crossbar. His resulting rage—”ERASAAAIED!”—leads him to found the order of the Knights Rubbish.
* Wendy Floopy: A obsolete floppy disk, tossed aside by her software engineer owner and now collects CDs in her recycling bin. She spurns Keshia’s romantic advances due to his ugliness but remains his friend.
* Ranawato Plato: A philosopher’s plate, left to gather dust after her owner, Bobus, committed suicide “due to the pain of existence.” She finds solace in a handsome, telepathic spoon and becomes a magician.
* Othox Codox: A magic codex, nearly destroyed after its author, Bobbington, was executed for homosexuality. It called upon divine blessings for a wheelchair and now serves as the party’s mage.
* The SS Brothers: Former MP3 players discarded in the age of smartphones, they joined a bin gang before being recruited by Keshia after a rigorous three-interview process, discarding their former title “for transitional justice’s sake.”

Thematically, the game is a surprisingly heavy meditation on obsolescence, loss, and the emotional weight we project onto inanimate objects. Every character is a victim of technological progress or personal tragedy, their heroism a coping mechanism for their irrelevance. The constant recurrence of owners named “Bob” (Bobby, Bobates, Bobus, Bobbington, Bobs) creates a bizarre, cosmic through-line, suggesting a single, careless deity figure responsible for all this sorrow. The dialogue and writing style are awkward and ESL-influenced, which only adds to the game’s peculiar, off-kilter charm. This is not the clean lore of a AAA title; it is the frantic, heartfelt scribbling of a singular auteur.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Knights Rubbish presents itself as a “co-op platformer fighter.” In practice, it is a side-scrolling action platformer built around a combo system inspired by Yu Chao’s research into Super Smash Bros. and Metal Slug.

• Core Loop: Players choose one of the five knights and battle through five levels of enemies and bosses, estimated to offer about two hours of total gameplay.
• Combat System: The combo system is direction-based: combining the skill button with up, down, or left/right inputs yields different moves, such as upward movements, defensive skills, or horizontal attacks. A simple, separate attack button exists for basic strikes. Yu Chao consciously avoided “charged attacks” or more complex “Attack-key Combos” to keep the game casual and accessible for co-op.
• Enemy & Boss Design: Drawing inspiration from Maplestory, the game features over 20 enemy types and several bosses, all implemented with simple state machines. Community feedback on Steam suggested the game felt “a little too slow-paced,” with calls for increased movement speed and decreased enemy health pools.
• Co-op: The local co-op functionality was a primary focus but also a primary weakness. The developer admitted it couldn’t be fully tested solo, and early patches were required to fix bugs where players would get stuck in levels during co-op play.
• Technical Issues: As an Early Access title abandoned by its developer, the game is inherently unstable. The UI, controls, and overall feel are described as unpolished and janky, a common trait of ambitious solo projects that outstripped their creator’s resources.

World-Building, Art & Sound

This is the domain where Knights Rubbish is most memorable, for better or worse.

• Visual Art Direction: The game’s most notorious feature is its “amazing photo realistic graphics.” Yu Chao created the assets by taking pictures of household objects with his phone and processing them in Affinity Photo. The result is a jarring, surreal collage. Knights are cut-out photos of erasers and floppy disks; environments are stitched-together images of desks, sidewalks, and recycling bins. It creates a bizarre, almost Dadaist atmosphere that is completely unique. It is not “good” in a conventional sense, but it is undeniably impactful and coherent in its own weird vision.
• Sound Design: The developer’s blog and Steam page note a significant missing feature: there is no background music. Sound effects are present but minimal. This absence creates a hollow, eerie atmosphere that, when combined with the visuals, feels intentionally avant-garde, though it was almost certainly due to a collaborator being unavailable (“my music creator is preparing for exams”).
• Atmosphere: The total package—the lo-fi photo-collage visuals, the silent landscapes, the tragicomedy of the character stories—creates a powerfully melancholic and absurdist tone. It feels less like a game and more like a playable art installation about loneliness and forgotten things.

Reception & Legacy

Knights Rubbish vanished into the ether upon release. With no critic reviews on aggregators like MobyGames or Metacritic, and only two user reviews on Steam (resulting in a “Mixed” rating and a Player Score of 50/100 on Steambase), it was a commercial and critical non-event.

Its legacy, however, is being written in the annals of obscurity. It is a game discovered by intrepid players sifting through Steam’s deepest catalog, a shared oddity for YouTube curiosities and “weird game” listicles. It serves as a perfect example of the “solo dev project” archetype: ambitious, flawed, heartfelt, and abandoned. It has influenced precisely no one, yet it perfectly encapsulates the challenges and strange beauties that can emerge from the indie development process. It is a museum piece, a fossil preserved in digital amber, illustrating a very specific moment and method of creation.

Conclusion

Knights Rubbish is not a game you play for a refined, enjoyable experience. You play it as an archaeologist, carefully brushing the dust from a peculiar find. It is a game of profound contradictions: its art is both its greatest innovation and its most glaring technical limitation; its story is both deeply silly and strangely poignant; its gameplay is both thoughtfully designed and utterly unpolished.

As a piece of entertainment, it fails. As a piece of art—a raw, unfiltered expression of one individual’s creative struggle—it is perversely brilliant. It is the video game equivalent of outsider art: untainted by commercial pressure, unburdened by convention, and ultimately, unable to fully communicate its intent. Knights Rubbish is, true to its name, a kind of rubbish. But like the characters within it, it has risen from the discard pile to achieve a unique, unforgettable, and oddly noble form of existence. It is a glorious, beautiful mess.