I met the unnamed Knytt first, and didn't meet Juni 'til later.
My exposure to indie games began in the 90s when my parents bought Klik'n'Play as a birthday present or something? when i was in primary school through the school's Scholastic Book Club. I started making a lot of terrible games, finished none of them, and enjoyed myself immensely. Later I discovered newgrounds and lurked a bunch. Years later in the the mid 2000s sometime, full of post-teenage ennui and deep in the throes of a mid-youth crisis, i typed "meditative platformer" into the world's largest search engine, and after a bit of trawling through a handful of pages (of the kind that was rapidly emerging as a dispiritingly large portion of the results of every search anyone made and would later be named 'listicles'), I ended up downloading Knytt off JayIsGames or Curly's World of Freeware or somewhere like that.
Hooked.
The sound design, the music, the minimal pixel aesthetic and level design more reminiscent of bonsai than computer games, and above all, the sense of wonder, resonated with me weirdly strongly. I went nifflas-crazy, devoured #Modarchive Story, MAS:Operator Status and WADF and loved them despite only being a barely competent gamer who usually eschewed that kind of unforgiving gameplay. So obviously when KS came out I devoured that too.
took a long break when I was busy pretending I'm an adult
i relate so hard to this. Four year gap in my posting, now I have a family and am pretending harder than ever. I'm skiving off my adult-person dayjob to write this. KS is a tiny wonderful holiday from the realer parts of Real Life™.
Edit: oof, just checked my own posts from 2018. A grand total of 2, after another gap of seven years. I am nothing if not consistently inconsistent