Shovel Knight is a retro 2D platformer game deeply devoted to its aesthetic and its puns. Designed as a pseudo-NES game, it harkens back to a long-ago era in gaming, and the game itself feels as if it fits into the era of Megaman. You are the Shovel Knight, a knight armed with a shovel who must beat his way past 12 stages to confront the Sorceress and rescue Shield Knight.
Story
ForShovel Knight is a retro 2D platformer game deeply devoted to its aesthetic and its puns. Designed as a pseudo-NES game, it harkens back to a long-ago era in gaming, and the game itself feels as if it fits into the era of Megaman. You are the Shovel Knight, a knight armed with a shovel who must beat his way past 12 stages to confront the Sorceress and rescue Shield Knight.
Story
For being such a simplistic game, there is a clear story to the game – Shovel Knight feels guilty because he could not save Shield Knight, and has recurring dreams of catching her while she is falling. Black Knight stands in between Shovel Knight and his goal, not out of loyalty to the Sorceress, but out of loyalty to Shield Knight. The Knights of No Order stand in the way for their own reasons.
Is there much story here? No. But there is enough of a story – and enough reinforcement of the central theme of the game – that it works, and is a bit more than an excuse plot due to the recurring dream of saving Shield Knight.
The game is also wonderfully full of terrible puns, and there are various townsfolk in a couple towns who can be spoken to and who often have silly dialogue.
Gameplay
The gameplay is very straightforward – Shovel Knight can hit things with his shovel, or use relics (of which there are 10), each of which has some special ability. Later on, Shovel Knight also gains the ability to charge up his shovel attacks to make them more powerful, and to switch which armor he is wearing for some minor bonus, frequently counteracted by some minor penalty.
The game is very much classic platforming, with the ability for shovel knight to attack enemies from the side with his shovel or spring up and down on top of them using his shovel like a pogo stick, occasionally necessary for navigating the levels or accessing secrets. The levels often make use of the fact that the protagonist wields a shovel, forcing them to dig through obstacles, sometimes taking advantage of the fact that the pogo sticking has to be stopped manually, and sometimes making use of the shovel otherwise by having Shovel Knight dig stuff out or dig through walls. There is a surprisingly decent variety of enemies, harkening back to Megaman type games, though some of them are repeated with only minor variations between them.
The relics add an additional complication to gameplay; however, I found that I didn’t end up using most of the relics very often, while the basic fireball attack relic, which granted a cheap ranged attack, and the temporary invincibility relic, were very versatile and useful. The rest were all very situational or just less cost efficient, though there were areas which specifically relied on the special properties of specific relics to navigate, which were interesting.
The levels themselves were reasonably varied, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the Megaman games, where each of the 8 major bosses had a specific world, and there was a prologue stage and 3 end-game stages which combined elements from all the previous stages. In addition to the main stages, there were a number of additional mini-stages which often focused on some specific aspect of the game; the overworld map even had Super Mario Brothers 3-esque enemies pop up and walk around on the world map, encouraging you to go fight them.
The levels also had various secrets hidden around them, and in hiding its secrets the game did quite well – the secrets are not immediately obvious, but if the player knows how to look, they stand out, and again remind me of secrets from the era. In addition to the relics, there are also musical tracks which serve as collectibles in the game, with one hidden in every level.
The bosses themselves were reasonably varied and had a decent variety of abilities, but unfortunately suffered from being rather too easy; only two bosses ever killed me, and both of those were because of environmental hazards in the stage which spelled instant death, rather than the actual boss whittling away my health. They were reasonably interesting to fight, but unfortunately the ease of beating them combined with ready access to relics and a couple items reminiscent of E-Tanks from Megaman (fully restoring both magic and health – you could refill them before every stage, too, and could carry two of them) meant that losing to them was extremely unlikely, making them a bit disappointing in terms of difficulty level.
On the whole, the game does a good job of recalling the 8-bit era, and it feels like a very solid game from that era. It is worth noting that the game also recalls the 8-bit era in terms of length as well – the game is pretty short, likely clocking in at 6-8 hours to complete, if not less, depending on how good you are at it and how much time you spend trying to collect achievements and gather money and search for every secret in the game.… Expand
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