Kill Knight Captures Drumming’s Multitasking Daze

By Diego Nicolás Argüello | August 1, 2025 | 1:00pm

Video Games Features kill knight

Kill Knight Captures Drumming’s Multitasking Daze

One of the hardest parts of learning to play drums is independence. Your limbs must be able to follow different time signatures and rhythms separately. While easy enough in isolation, the key is that all limbs must work in tandem in favor of the beat. And then come the subtleties involved with each part of the drum kit, as your force and technique regulate what they all bring to the song you’re playing.

I’ve been air drumming my whole life, but I only started practicing with a teacher just over a year ago. In the beginning, I could follow simple rhythms just fine, which allowed me to jump from one, two, three, four to and one and two and three and four fairly quickly. Hitting the snare, hi-hat, and kick was easy enough… until I tried to play “Last Caress” by The Misfits, that is. The song’s double kick follows a faster tempo than the hi-hat. I could manage the kicks, but when I tried to do so while hitting the hi-hat in an eighth note, my arm automatically tried to match the kick’s speed.

It took me several months of practice to develop that independence, occasionally returning to the song to see my progress. In the meantime, I had no shortage of other obstacles: learning a technique to actually be able to do double and triplet kicks for a sustained amount of time without getting fatigued, practicing coordination to start moving around the kit to use the toms, experimenting with the subtleties of how much strength you use with a drumstick, and more. Every time I hit a roadblock, my teacher’s advice is to slow down. And, if it’s proving too difficult, the best is to isolate one or two limbs at a time to get a feel of the rhythm, and then integrate other parts of the kit slowly.

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Kill Knight offers similar mercy, at least at first. Before you get started killing demons and plunging through five increasingly harder layers of hell, there’s a menu with basic, intermediate, and expert tutorials. Each of them feels essential—the twin-stick shooter, which is a mix of Devil Daggers with a haunted rendition of Assault Android Cactus, has its own set of intricacies. Some existing knowledge of the genre can carry over and ease the learning curve, but only slightly. In order to actually make progress, you need to learn how each of the knight’s actions works, including their purpose, and then put everything together.

The catch is that Kill Knight has an intense, fast-paced rhythm. Reaching a flow state and being able to multitask are mandatory requisites. Using a controller, you’re in constant movement with one thumb while aiming with the other one and holding the right shoulder button to shoot. But there are also actions like dodging, parrying, and reloading, each often with multiple purposes. Timing them correctly is imperative. And of course, stopping in place to perform any of them usually leads to getting hit by an enemy.

Kill Knight

At first, I approached the game merely as an arcade-inspired shooter with a high skill ceiling, similar to the likes of Housemarque’s Nex Machina. The more I played, however, the more this ecosystem of actions resonated with the act of drumming. Whether you’re doing a fill or simply timing a hit to the crash and the kick pedal at the same time, the beat must not be interrupted. Considering that Kill Knight has a scoring system fueled primarily by a kill streak meter, you’re constantly tantalized by the idea of making it to the end without losing the streak—or beat—of your demon slaughter.

When reading drum notation, notes are separated by vertical bar lines, with the space between them being called a measure. Beats are then counted by playing different notes within those measures. The act of reloading your weapon in Kill Knight, which riffs on Gears of War, feels similar to jumping from one measure to the next—a small bar appears on screen, and you must press a button as a moving icon matches its center. Sure, this is mainly intended to reload, but doing so can absorb resources on the ground to heal the knight and charge a wrath meter, or you can also swing your sword against enemies to have them drop ammo for your heavy weapon instead.

Like playing a song, you decide how a measure ends. Sometimes you simply repeat what came before and focus on maintaining the beat, and other times you do a fill or hit one of the cymbals before immediately moving to the next measure. It’s one thing to fail this when you’re practicing on your own. When you rehearse and play live with others, the drum is what maintains the beat for everyone. Being even slightly off tempo can make the band lose balance, rhythm, momentum.

Messing up a note is disheartening. Sure, it can happen to anybody, but through the act of learning a skill comes the possibility of falling into the trap of perfectionism. It’s no surprise that one of the opening character animations when you kick off a run in Kill Knight shows the knight slamming his fist to the ground in frustration. Both in the game and while playing drums, improvement requires constant practice and repetition. Kill Knight understands this by sidelining meta-progression and roguelite mechanics, instead presenting a structure—which enemies appear and when, or the order in which the level shapeshifts and introduces traps—that always stays the same.

As such, there isn’t much to strive for here. You’re not lured by artificial incentives. It’s possible to unlock different equipment items that behave differently, but all you’re doing is imposing yourself with new techniques to master. In Kill Knight, it’s mainly you competing against your past self, shaving off seconds from your previous scores. As it’s a common occurrence in the genre, your score is added to global leaderboards, where you can compare your progress against others. In a similar vein, I’m constantly seeing videos from other drummers, trying to mimic their techniques and different song interpretations. But I rarely get to learn about their backstories, how long they’ve been drumming and how much time they’ve spent practicing their craft.

How much I feed my perfectionist self is up to me alone, and it’s hard to avoid it. It’s the type of perfectionism around rhythm games and the frustration that comes from not only missing a note, but missing the precision of hitting one at the right time, getting a “good” rating instead of “great” or “perfect.” The mastery of a song, then, is not just dependent on whether you can do a full combo, completing a track while hitting all notes, but how well you perform doing so.

Perfectionism can be infectious. It runs through every vein in your body. The pressure of a performance tenses your muscles and clenches your jaw. It takes practice upon practice to reach a point at which your limbs can act independently and in tandem simultaneously, a state in which your mind can drift and everything else becomes natural. And then you do it all over again.

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more. You can also find him on Bluesky.