Progress Knight starts you at fourteen, homeless, begging for a few coins a day. The whole game is a stack of labelled progress bars: jobs on one tab, skills on another, a shop where a tent and a book eventually become affordable. You click a bar to select it, and only one job and one skill run at a time.
The clock is what makes it interesting. You are not accumulating time, you are spending it. Days tick past at four per real-world second whether or not you use them, and the character dies at seventy. That turns a career-ladder idler into a scheduling problem: fifty usable years, one training slot, a rent bill every day.
How the loop works
Jobs pay coins per day and gain levels from experience, and each level raises the income. Skills level the same way but pay out in multipliers: Concentration raises all xp gain, Productivity speeds up job xp, Bargaining cuts expenses, and Meditation raises Happiness, which multiplies all xp again. Shop items charge coins every day and pay back xp or happiness, so the net-per-day figure governs the early game.
Three career tracks run in parallel: common work from Beggar to Merchant, the military from Squire to Legendary knight, and the Arcane Association, hidden until Concentration and Meditation both hit level 200. The Association is the one worth working for, because the endgame skills live there.
Rebirth, and then rebirth again
The rebirth tab appears at age 25. The first reset becomes available at 65 and is forced on you at 70. It wipes your levels and coins but keeps your max levels, and grants every job and skill a permanent multiplier of 1 plus its max level divided by ten. A skill pushed to 300 returns with a 31x multiplier, which is why a first life spent crawling becomes twenty minutes the second time and a rounding error the fifth.
The second layer sits at age 200, reachable only after Immortality and Super immortality have stretched the 70-year lifespan. "Embrace evil" resets max levels too, discarding every multiplier you spent lives building. In exchange you get Evil, banked from the Evil control and Blood meditation skills during the life you sacrifice, which multiplies dark magic xp permanently and makes the six Dark magic skills available. It is an uncomfortable button, and it is where the game stops being a career sim.
The late game is the weak part. Super immortality is gated behind Chairman at level 1000, and the stretch to it from Master wizard is flat and long.
Controls, mobile, and the offline question
Mouse only: click a job or skill row to select it, click shop rows to buy or sell. The sidebar carries Pause, Auto-promote, Auto-learn and Enable warp, the automation toggles appearing at age 20. Settings holds save import and export, dark mode, and a hard reset.
There is no offline progress. It autosaves to browser storage every three seconds, but time passes only while the tab is open and unpaused, so closing the browser expecting a fortune gets you exactly where you left. That is unusual for the genre and it is the loudest complaint from players arriving off Cookie Clicker.
On a phone it loads and plays, but the tables want more width than a phone gives them. CrazyGames lists it desktop only, and itch.io players report using desktop mode as a workaround.
How long it takes
The first life is calculable: age 14 to 65 at four game-days per second is a little over seventy-five minutes of real time. After that it depends on how well you played, because the multipliers compound. Reaching Chairman, Super immortality and a first Embrace evil is tens of hours of an open tab, and thirty to fifty hours is fair for everything the original holds. No official figure exists, so treat that as a range, not a target.
Tips for progressing faster
- Train Concentration before anything else, every life. It multiplies all xp and gates Productivity, Bargaining and Meditation.
- Turn the automation on at 20, but watch what Auto-learn picks. It targets the skill with the lowest remaining xp, which is good for breadth and wrong when you want one skill spiked hard.
- Under-buy your housing. Expenses are charged daily and compound all life. A Wooden hut you can comfortably run beats a House that eats the income.
- In a life already written off, dump everything into one skill. The multiplier comes from max level, so one absurd Mana control run banks its 31x forever even though the level vanishes.
- Get Apprentice mage to 10 for Immortality and Mage to 10 for Time warping. Time warping raises game speed itself, so every level repays real-world minutes.
- Delay Embrace evil longer than feels comfortable. Evil scales with the life you give up.
Who made it, and which version you are looking at
Progress Knight was made by Ihtasham42, source at github.com/ihtasham42/progress-knight under the Unlicense, a public domain dedication that asks nothing of anyone, credit included. We name him because that is our rule, not because a licence made us. Official places to play: GitHub Pages, Armor Games, CrazyGames and itch.io.
Because the licence carries no conditions, the game has been forked well over a hundred times, and much of what people mean by "Progress Knight" is one of those. The largest is Progress Knight: Quest (indomit/progress_knight_2, built on Symb1's version), adding prestige layers, challenges, a skill tree and perks. Progress Knight: Reborn by Cameron Gott adds jobs, skills and items to the original frame. Progress Knight: Rewritten by Zdzban3 rebuilds the interface. Past those sit forks of forks.
The quick test: the original has two rebirth layers, three career tracks, no skill tree. If the page in front of you mentions challenges, perks, dark matter or a third prestige layer, it is a fork. The App Store apps Progress Knight: Mobile and Progress Knight: Remastered are likewise third-party builds, not releases by Ihtasham42.