Project Reforged Brings Sonic and the Black Knight Back As A Fan-Made Remake, And It's Playable On Steam Deck

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There are a couple of ways to play older games that haven't been re-released for current-generation devices, and one of my favorites is fan games. These are made by people who are extremely passionate about the game, which usually leads to some wonderful improvements on the original iteration. Sometimes, these fan games are based on relatively unknown titles or ones that got mediocre or poor reviews, and that's exactly the case with Project Reforged.

While I was scrolling around Twitter/X, I saw a post about Project Reforged, a fan-made remake of Sonic and the Black Knight made by Besk61, and I was interested. This is a game that was originally released in 2009 for the Wii, following Sonic and the Secret Rings, but it had very mixed reviews. This led to the game being delisted from retailers and ultimately forgotten. However, thanks to Besk61, it has a chance to live on in a different way.

Besk is taking it upon himself to reimagine the original experience, while still staying faithful to its core. It modernizes the controls for smoother gameplay, adds a new parry mechanic, adds a new boss fight, refreshes the visuals, and more. It looks to be an awesome way to experience this older game. It is a little rough around the edges still; this is an extremely early alpha, but I just had to test to see how it would work on the Steam Deck, and it isn't as bad as I expected.

Now, Project Reforged is in very early alpha and doesn’t have controller support, but I still wanted to check it out anyway to see if it can be played. And yes, it can, but it still has a lot of work ahead.

Installation is quite easy. All you have to do is download the game from itch.io, extract the files to a folder on your Deck, then add the exe to Steam. From there, just force a proton layer. I used Proton GE 10-27, and then hit play. It should be all set from there, and nothing else needs to be done to get it running.

The game currently only has one level, but it has multiple stages to show off different missions. For the most part, all of them are playable, but there are dips when too much foliage is shown on screen. As soon as that clears up, performance increases dramatically, and I even saw frame rates going up to 90. I didn’t expect this at all, since this is an early alpha, so I’d take it as a good sign.

And despite no controller support yet, it still feels very good to play on a gamepad. This is thanks to Steam Input, which allows us to map Keyboard and Mouse prompts to a controller. In Project Reforged’s case, there aren’t many controls, and the only one I actually needed to map was the “Shift” button to B so I could parry. Otherwise, everything else was automatically mapped well, and no other action was needed.

Since this is in alpha, I would probably wait until there’s more content in the game to actually play it. But for what it’s worth, I think it’s on the right path so far. It will need some optimizing, especially for foliage, but it runs quite well otherwise, and it controls well despite not having controller support just yet. I’m looking forward to fully experiencing this reimagining of Sonic and the Black Knight, and seeing what comes of Project Reforged in the future.

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