You can get Knytt on Steam now
It's hard to overstate how important Nifflas was to "the indie games scene" when I first got involved in indie games.
Back then, Steam barely existed, and most PC indies weren't releasing on it. "Indie games" were, to me, free web games - mostly flash games, and mostly on sites like Newgrounds. I only knew about a couple downloadable titles. I think the first one I ever got was Seiklus.
Knytt blew my brain wide open. Like Seiklus, it's a dreamy, calming platformer with pretty achievable challenges. I remember playing it in two or three breathless sittings, then immediately rushing downstairs, connecting my laptop to the television, and forcing my family to see the game. This must have happened during my freshman year of college, because I didn't own a laptop until then. I remember trying to explain to my dad why Knytt being easy was kind of a revelation to me. My family probably just wanted the TV back.
I played Nifflas's other big mid-2000s game, Within a Deep Forest, shortly afterward. It's similarly sprawling. Both of these games probably come across to modern audiences as merely highly-polished, competently-designed platformers. At the time, it was completely crazy to have access to a full-length free game like this, or like Cave Story, or the other popular freeware games I'd just started to discover. Freeware indie game development was actively going into overdrive around this time. Being around for stuff like Knytt and Within a Deep Forest - and particularly for Knytt's sequel, Knytt Stories, which could load user-made levels - felt like being around for the big bang. I know a lot of people whose lives were changed by exposure to this stuff in middle school, high school, and college.
Anyway!! The point I've been trying to get to is that Knytt, the original, was just re-released for free on Steam as Knytt Classic. Nifflas himself had some nice comments about it. This thread led me to check out what he's working on now, and it seems delightful. He remains one of the big brains in indie platforming, and I'm so glad his old work is being preserved. (You really gotta play Uurnog Uurnlimited!!)
I wrote recently about how weird it it is to think back on what got me into game development - the games that made me feel like I could make games myself - and realize that most of them are fucking gone. Platforms dropping Flash basically eradicated the cultural memory of my childhood and young adulthood. If we're truly gonna enter an age of millennial nostalgia, I want to see the games history of my youth resurrected, where possible. I spent most of my teens not buying videogames... because I was playing flash games instead. These were experimental, bizarre, sometimes straightforwardly garish and unpleasant games made (by hand!!!!) by young people, by complete nobodies, and slapped on the internet for free. They were games that made a random college student a hero to, like, 1000 middle schoolers who all went on to make the most insane webgames imaginable a couple years later. There's mainstream commercial stuff out there today that only exists because people threw inspirational shit online for free in 2006 and 2007. Knytt is one of the bigger ones looming in my memory, for sure.