I got Shovel Knight! It’s awesome, even when it gets slam-my-head-into-my-desk difficult. Really good stuff by Yacht Club Games, a company with former WayForward developers, that have worked on…well, lots of stuff.
What I think Shovel Knight does best, though, and that many games of its ilk fail at, is that it is a “Retro Game” that is true to the name.
“Retro games” are all the rage these days. Go look at Kickstarter right now. There are a few things the site is obsessed with, currently: wallets, documentaries, making some nondescript food item and getting a bunch of money for jumping on that bandwagon, and retro games.
My interest in this topic does not stem from the sudden surge of love for retro games. There are numerous other posts on the subject that you can peruse through. What I am interested in is what separates the good retro games from the bad ones.
Make no mistake, Shovel Knight is a damn good game, retro or not. But it has a few great qualities that separate it from other retro games.
Shovel Knight is tied to the design mechanics of the NES and other retro consoles. But it is not chained to those mechanics. It does not feel the need to be so faithful to the source material that it draws from that it gets hurt from a game-design perspective in the process.
There are no limited lives in this game, for example. You can die over and over again, with the only penalty being the loss of some of the treasure you collected. Plus, with skill, you can regain that money, as it floats in the air near the area of your death, waiting to be picked up again.
Then there is the fact that Shovel Knight allows you to choose your own difficulty, in a sense. When you pass a checkpoint, you can also destroy it, allowing you to obtain a bunch of treasure that adds to your score. On the flipside, this means that if you die, you’ll be brought closer to the beginning of the stage, losing time and progress. This allows you to customize your difficulty and progress as you see fit. I don’t have time to retry stages over and over again, so I can keep my checkpoints in place. But players who are more daring/adventurous than I can destroy them as they see fit. This is the sort of modern addition to a “retro” game that keeps it fresh and easily playable in today’s gaming landscape.
Even with these new modern bells and whistles, Shovel Knight plays like it were an NES game – one that I believe would be very popular were it released in that era. This gameplay extends itself in small and major forms, from things like jumping “in front of” the HUD, to the pogo-sticking of the old Ducktails game, to the fantastic NES-like soundtrack provided by the wonderful Jake Kaufman. The game also takes the Mega Man 2 and Castlevania approach to gameplay. It provides you a basic skill-set that can be adapted into any situation within the game, then sprinkles extra items that can be used to provide experimentation and different strategies. In short, Shovel Knight keeps all of the aspects that are enjoyable about Retro NES games, and removes the aspects that should be left in the dust.
Have you played Evoland? I have, and I hated it. It spends too much time trying to point at itself and say, “Look at me, I’m a game that tailors to your nostalgia!”, that it forget to spend time on being a good game.
Shovel Knight does not have that flaw. It focuses on being a good game first, and tailors to those more nostalgic aspects as icing on the cake. This, I think, is what separates Shovel Knight from other recent Retro Indie Games, and takes it beyond a something that’s attempting to cash in on a recent craze. I look forward to Yacht Club Game’s next effort – retro or not, Shovel Knight proves that they have what it takes to make games that are enjoyable.
Eight-Bit Samurai 