I have been playing PostKnight three weeks
PostKnight, is a free to play RPG available on mobile devices. You play as a mail carrier who happens to be a knight, a PostKnight if you will. You make deliveries while charging forward with your weapon, defending with your shield, or healing with your potions. It’s a game that has two main ‘game modes’ that I’ll delve into shortly.
Two game modes of PostKnight
Let’s talk about the two ‘game modes’ of PostKnight that I mentioned earlier.
PostKnight’s Delivery Mode
As a PostKnight, your role is to make deliveries all throughout the land in the game. When you play a stage, the game becomes a side-scroller. The PostKnight will automatically run forward towards the left-side of the screen and the player gets to control the PostKnight with three buttons: Charge, Block, or Heal. Each action will put that button on a cool-down until the player can press the button once more.
While your PostKnight is running forward, his enemies will be charging at him from the left-side of the screen and need to be defeated before he could proceed to go any further. This is where the strategy comes into play. Do you charge at the enemy headfirst? Or do you play defensively with constant blocking and healing?
This is the main gameplay of PostKnight. You can get into this mode by performing a Delivery at the MailBox, picking a Route from the Route Selection (which acts a Time Trial), or simply press the “GO” on the bottom left-hand side of the screen for the single-player story mode campaign.
PostKnight’s Overworld
When you are not delivering packages, you are in the game’s overworld. For most, this wouldn’t count as an extra game mode, but you could spend just as much time here as well as the delivery mode. When you start the game, you’ll only have access to “Pompon” which is your starting area. Each area has the same functions, its just the aesthetic and lore behind each area that differs (as well as the difficulty).
Resource Management in PostKnight
When you are in the Overworld, you get to interact with the Area’s Inn, Blacksmith, Potion Shop, and Store. Here is where you spend all the goodies that you earn from the Delivery Mode to boost your character.
The Inn helps with quickly regenerating your health and for the exchange of coins, you could increase the amount of health you gain back with time (think of the Wolverine, the most you invest here, the quicker you regenerate any injuries).
The Blacksmith is where you exchange coins and materials to upgrade the weapons and armor your character has. Each item can be upgraded up to 5 times, and you get an extra ‘perk’ for upgrading an item fully (such as an increased walking speed, extra damage, etc).
The Potion Shop is where you exchange materials to upgrade the potions you use when you heal. You could choose to upgrade your potions so that they heal more damage, reduce the cool-down between use, as well as, boost your defensive stats after use.
The Store allows you to purchase items for coins and materials. These items include materials, gear for the Blacksmith, and gifts (which we’ll get to shortly)
The final resource that you’ll need to manage are ‘gems’. Gems are quickly gained through micro-transactions, but can be gained by unlocking achievements, completing quests, and defeating a certain amount of enemies listed on the Area’s bulletin board. Gems are the “pay-to-win” method of playing PostKnight and could help you quickly level-up, heal, or refresh inventories of shops and quests.
Gems also allow you to purchase several ‘pets’ in PostKnight, but they are not required to purchase to enjoy the game.
Building Relationships in PostKnight
In the Overworld, you’ll also find additional female residents that you can interact with. These residents each have five hearts that determine how much they like you. The way you can earn their affection is by giving them gifts which are obtained by doing deliveries or making purchases at the Area’s store. Each resident has their own likes and dislikes, so you need to experiment with giving them different gifts every day until you figure out what will make their relationship meter increase versus what will make it drop.
These residents also give you gifts every day so don’t forget to chat with them once a day to get your goods.
When you max out your relationship with a resident, their hearts will never drop (at least from what I have experienced), and they’ll share the name of an item they really want. If you obtain and give them that item, then you get a picture of your PostKnight and that character spending time together. It’s not much of a bonus, but it’s something to check off.
You can also purchase a pet in each Area. Pompton has a Dire Wolf Pup that you can adopt and name in exchange for coins, but the others require gems (so I only have one pet). These pets also have a relationship meter, but it goes up significantly slower than the female residents and can be fed much more frequently as well. They also fetch you gifts, so don’t forget to chat with them to get them.
What’s Good about PostKnight?
PostKnight is a free game
I love free games, even if it’s free for a limited amount of time. This allows me to download the game and see if it’s the kind of game I want to further invest my time and money into, or if it was simply a quick ‘fling’ that I could remove from my mobile device.
PostKnight does not require wifi connection to play
As someone who frequently takes the train, having a game that I could play during the many many times that i lose my wi-fi and phone signal is a huge plus. Many games out in the app market require a wifi connection to play, but for PostKnight you could just boot it up and play whenever you want, wherever you are. It’s the main reason why it has stayed on my iPad for so long.
PostKnight lets me play the way I want.
PostKnight has RPG elements in it that allow you to level up your character in four different stats: Strength (STR), Agility (AGI), Intelligent (INT), and Vitality (VIT). While this is standard for most RPGs, what makes PostKnight fun is that I’m allowed to invest my points the way I want without ruining the game experience. And if I want to redo my stats, it costs 50 gems, which honestly isn’t too difficult to obtain.
For those who are curious, my PostKnight build is one of a “glass cannon”. I have been putting the majority of my stat points into Agility and then a smaller portion to Strength. My other two stats are still at one. Despite at how unbalanced I’ve built my character, he still kicks some serious butt and I enjoy getting critical hits 90% of the time.
PostKnight has a really cute art style!
PostKnight has this 2D brightly colored aesthetic. All the characters and environments are drawn in a stylized manner in which their heads are significantly larger than their bodies and their hands are fingerless ‘blobs’. Some people call this style ‘chibi’. I love how the world is illustrated, and I love the color choices to make it bright and lively.
The transitions from the Overworld and the Routes are always a pleasure to watch and I also love the UI (user-interface) of the world as well.
What’s Bad about PostKnight?
PostKnight characters have no eyes
As I mentioned before, I love the art-style of PostKnight. It’s cute, it’s colorful, it’s definitely perfect for me. However whenever you interact with the various residents of the town, their head appears in the text box and none of these headshots have their eyes in it. At first I thought it was a glitch, but the more people and pets I interacted with, the more I realized this was a design choice. It’s just so jarring having these eye-less heads talk to my PostKnight.
The only exceptions to this are characters that have well-defined eyebrows such as Chief Merrick who is the Innkeeper of Pompton and Blacksmith Aden who also is a Pompton resident. At least in those cases, the thick eyebrows replace what would be just a blank face.
PostKnight’s gender
It’s such a small nit-pick, but when I saw the PostKnight, I thought my character would either be ambiguous about their gender (letting the player identify the PostKnight as either male or female). With how ‘cute’ the art style was, I didn’t immediately think that my main character was male. Also he has pink hair, so that didn’t make me think ‘male’ either.
At first, I thought that the game would just let the player decide on the gender of the PostKnight, after all, we were able to name the protagonist so why not? However it was after an hour or so of gameplay before any pronouns were used. It actually pulled me out of the game temporarily since I already had labeled my character as ‘female’ in my mind during that whole time.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the game. I just wish it was more obvious in the dialogue early on to let me know the gender of my character. I spent so much time in the stages gushing about how ‘cute’ she was and the fact that it was brought up so late was a bit of a speed bump in my enjoyment.
Details in PostKnight’s Story
PostKnight is a causal game and its story is not meant to be taken super seriously, however, there was a point in the story that I was pulled out of the experience and I’m sure a few tweaks would have immediately fixed my problem.
Since my PostKnight is a ‘glass cannon’, this means that I probably grind a lot more than the average player. So when I arrived at Caldemount (4th area) and the cut scene happened in which the PostKnight’s superiors from the PostKnight Headquarters congratulated me about being a B-Rank PostKnight, it really threw me off. By the time I reached that scene, my PostKnight Rank was already an A.
If there was a way to code in the cutscene for them to check what rank your character was before congratulating you on it, that would have made the scene a lot more immersive. Instead what I felt was confusion since I worked hard to work up the ladder of the PostKnight realm. However I can’t blame them too much since I admittedly did a lot more doing Missions than the average player probably would have at that point.
What’s Else Does PostKnight Deliver?
Once you reach a certain point, PostKnight unlocks an additional feature to the game. This feature unfortunately is restricted to wi-fi, but it’s to join one of the three Divisions of PostKnight. These divisions are Pyrodash, Etherdawn, and Neverwhisk.
This mode allows you to compete with other PostKnight players by turning in certain materials to earn points for your team. The requested Item Selection rotates so there are many opportunities to donate to the cause if you find that you don’t have the materials they request. This mode also gives you a reason to replay Routes and horde items that otherwise would be worthless after you get stronger (i.e. Pompton’s materials would be worthless if you are at a level to handle Caldemount quests).
What PostKnight Divison should you join?
If you want to win, then Pyrodash is the team you should join. In the short time that I’ve been playing, Pyrodash has been beating the other two teams by a landslide. I believe the PostKnight community in Reddit actively recruits and encourages people to join that faction.
However, the division I joined is Neverwhisk.
Neverwhisk is the underdog of the three divisions. In the short amount of time I’ve been in the division, we’ve constantly held the third place status. This is something I didn’t mind after picking my division since I enjoy being apart of the underdog team (like Team Instinct in Pokemon Go).
I picked this team since I loved the aesthetic of the team logo.
Interested in trying out PostKnight?
If any of this piques your interest, please give PostKnight a shot. It’s a free-to-play game that is enjoyable without having to invest in the micro-transactions. I so far have 714 gems saved up from just playing the game and I believe it’s enjoyable without the spending a dime.
Want me to try other games or apps?
Either comment below your favorite apps (iOS preferred) or tweet at me so I can try out other apps. I know this post may feel a bit different than my productivity and minimalism posts, but I enjoy playing games (tabletop, app, and console) during my downtime. So if there’s any that you’d like for me to try, let me know.