Knight Crawlers, from Good Morning Games and The Iterative Collective, was offering multiplayer demos all weekend at PAX Aus, garnering a bit of queue from attendees wanting to try their hand at the unique looking dungeon crawler.

Knight Crawlers uses wobbly physics, resulting in the bobble headed knights and characters looking like half-drunk chibis on the way to the next pub as they swerve around the playfield. The demo itself was confined to a single screen, with both players separated by a wall, having to take on both enemies and traps on their side of the wall with melee and ranged attacks.

The trick is that after every small wave of enemies, the screen fills with giant cards for you to choose a perk from. These cards impede your field of vision completely, but also give you rapid choices for upgrading your character – for instance, adding extra projectiles to their ranged attack or doubling their health. Combat feels relatively simple at this stage, which is probably necessary given the speed at which the game progresses.

After several fast waves and rounds of upgrading via cards, the final stage of the demo raised the divider between the two sides of the screen, and asking both players to duel to the death. It’s here that your separate choices in upgrades are brought into play the most, as while we’d both chosen health upgrades during our wave attacks, it was my extra projectiles that ultimately sealed the deal in my favour during the demo.

You can check out a trailer featuring some of Knight Crawlers PvP gameplay below: