by Jacob Doolin
An Ace of Spade
If there is
one trend in the current gaming market that I hold at arm’s length it’s the
retro revival. Sure, the idea of capturing those feelings from our past gaming
glories sounds good, but typically the end products take all the wrong features
from those begotten eras. Limited color palettes, linear gameplay, and that
feeling that you might as well just play the original hinder most of these
games. Yet developer Yacht Club Games have managed to sidestep these obstacles
to create something special in Shovel
Knight.
Right off
the bat,, the Shovel Knight surprises
with its gameplay, both in how it takes inspiration from past games and for
what it add to it. Players familiar with
Super Mario Bros or Ducktails will be right at home with Shovel Knights’ platforming, which
offers some of the most thought provoking jumps I’ve seen. Shovel Knight also takes another feature from Super Mario Bros in the use of its world map, which allows for
players to tackle any of the games eight-world bosses whenever they chose.
One of the
best features that Shovel Knight adds
to the gameplay is the way it handles death. Instead of giving players a set
number of lives, each time you die in Shovel
Knight three bags of your loot drop giving you just one chance to get back
and grab it. The feature is very much like the souls system in Dark Souls, giving the game a greater
sense of tension as you try to inch your way back to your loot. Level
checkpoints also eliminate some of the tedious backtracking that punctuated
several of the game Shovel Knight takes
inspiration from.
The story
of Shovel Knight also builds off
those games by providing more interesting characters than I thought possible in
an 8-bit game. Every boss, villager, and traveler express himself or herself
through a wide array of text from the humorous to the sad. And the core
narrative of Shovel Knight rescuing his love Shield Knight goes beyond the
typical Damsel in Distress trope and offers a compelling female character who
can handle her own. One does wish that
instead of short bits of text the player might be given a more in-depth story
that explains how these characters came to form the relationships they did. As
it stand now the game has very interesting pieces to what could be an epic
narrative in the future.
Visually
the game impresses, offering varied and beautiful level design. Playing on the
3DS I was amazed at what such a small studio was able to do with the handheld,
especially with the 3D, which gave the game’s backdrop a more rounded view.
Unfortunately, the game’s enemies leave much to be desired, many of which are
just color swapped versions of previously seen foes. It’s also important to
note that playing on a handheld it was easy to see that the game’s graphics
were downgraded a little from its PC counterpart, but not enough to make a big
difference.
If there is
one image from Shovel Knight that
will stick with me, it’s the sight of Shovel Knight sitting alone next to a
campfire with stars gleaming overhead. It’s an image as thoughtful as the game
it resides from, with so many new and interesting ideas in Shovel Knight it’s the perfect image to end on. Yacht Club Games
have crafted something that demands to be played, and by the end you too will
be staring up at those stars, imagining the the future’s possibilities.
