Spiral Knights

The Spiral Knights are a spacefaring army from the planet Isora. Their ship, the Skylark, has crashed on the planet Cradle. The interior of the planet is filled with a mechanized, continually reconfiguring dungeon called the Clockworks. Operating out of the town of Haven on the planet's surface, the knights descend into the Clockworks, with the goal of understanding the mysterious energy source at the planet's core. They hope to exploit this energy source to resurrect and re-launch the Skylark.

In its gameplay, Spiral Knights is a top-down, third-person, real-time action-adventure game, comparable to The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. The player controls a single knight, and may play solo or with other players. When exploring the Clockworks, knights cooperate to defeat crowds of enemies of various types, while dodging traps and solving simple puzzles. There are four main bosses, each with an alternate "Shadow Lair" variant, and numerous mini-bosses. In addition to this player-versus-enemy mode, there are two optional player-versus-player modes: one that is similar to Clockworks play, and a Bomberman-like mini-game that differs substantially from the rest of the game.

The Spiral Knights are a spacefaring army serving under the Spiral Order organisation. According to the prologue, the war against the Morai brought them near extinction on their home planet of Isora. The crew of the Skylark, a spaceship of the Spiral Order, fled the planet in search for "a source of incredible power" in hopes of being able to use it to save their planet, and in doing so, discover the planet of Cradle. As Captain Ozlo declared preparations to descend into Cradle, the Skylark was attacked by a heavy firepower, damaging the tearium core of the ship and rendering the ship destroyed.

All knights abroad the Skylark evacuated via escape pods. The player is one of these knights, and upon completing character customisation is led by Rhendon, a Recon Knight, through the Crash Site to the Rescue Camp. This serves as the tutorial of the gameplay.

Spiral Knights has been in development since around 2007. The game was released to advance testers on November 12, 2009 and to the general public on April 4, 2011. The game was released through the Steam software distribution system on June 14, 2011. It was also made available through gaming web sites such as Kongregate and Armor Games. The game, along with most of Three Rings's software, originally ran on Java 6; as of February 2026, it bundles a Java 21 runtime as part of the installation.

As encouragement to get players in the game, Team Fortress 2 added a special item for any players that completed the first mission. Players who own both games will receive a message from Saxton Hale offering the promotion.