Continuing on WayForward spinoffs, we have Shovel Knight, which recently got its final content update. Good value!
Yacht Club Games, composed of former WayForward employees, Kickstarted this game back in 2013. Ever since, they’ve been slowly updating it with features promised as part of the crowdfunding campaign. The initial release in mid-2014 was so successful that the eponymous knight has popped up in many, many other games since.
Said game is a very intentional homage to NES action platformers like Rockman and Castlevania. Development was focused on recreating an authentic 8-bit experience, even limiting the audio and visuals to NES capabilities… with some cheating. The result is gorgeous, impeccable pixel art with tons of parallax background work, plus banging chiptunes from WayForward veteran Jake Kaufman. I’ve been tired of 8-bit nostalgia for a long time, but this does it so well it’s nigh-impossible not to be impressed.
In gameplay terms, you have a world map à la Mario 3, and selectable stages with Rockman-like bosses. Shovel Knight’s primary attack vector is swinging a shovel, but even better is the Zelda 2-style downthrust, which can also bounce you back up like Scrooge’s Ducktales cane. The stage design wonderfully tests these skills, with hidden secrets everywhere and lots of shiny gems to grab. These are used between levels to buy upgrades back at town: improving health and mana, and gaining new active and passive abilities.
The game has had a complicated history of updates and platform exclusive bonuses, but suffice it to say that at this point the “Treasure Trove” edition contains three complete new stories in the same world, playing as boss characters from the base game with fun new abilities for combat and movement. Plague Knight is more technical, with air-stalling bomb-throwing and boost jumps. Specter Knight uses a contextual slash attack for angled dashes. And King Knight has a combination shoulder barge-spin jump. Plague’s campaign uses the same stages more or less, Specter has new levels with the same theme, and King breaks it up into many smaller levels plus adds a mostly-optional card game mechanic between action stages (your enjoyment of this may vary).
In terms of exclusives on 3DS, they’re locked behind amiibo but if you can access the features there’s a cool “custom knight” mode that auto-unlocks upgrades as you collect gold, including some of Plague and Specter’s powers and even all-new subweapons. There’s also a handful of extra tasks in the “challenge” mode, a fun diversion with specific rules to test a particular skill (I didn’t do any of the “beat boss with one health” challenges, though).
Despite a tremendous sense of fun and silliness in the writing and character design (which extends to all campaigns), the world and story are also taken seriously, giving weight to the occasional emotional moment such as the brief interludes after levels.
I must mention that one of the Kickstarter promises which was latterly fulfilled was the “body swap” mode, a menu feature that swaps the gender (and separately, pronouns) of the main characters. Two of the twelve are female by default, but you can make it an all-lady game, or any combination you like! I found this a really cool thing to include, but the intense frustration quickly set in when I realised this change only applied to the original “Shovel of Hope” campaign, and was not supported in the other three character’s stories. What a rug-pull!
Regardless, Shovel Knight is an excellently put-together game. You couldn’t ask for a better fulfillment of 8-bit sensibilities combined with modern conveniences. Special mention again to the aerial mobility of all four characters, which is augmented by their various subweapon powers!