Reviewed on: Nintendo Switch

Nowadays there is practically a gamer subculture built around retro games. Shovel Knight, released in 2014, is possibly the biggest reason this genre has gained so much strength in recent years. The game, funded on Kickstarter, was such a hit that it received ports to countless platforms and still gets updates and content expansions to this day.

And now, celebrating the release of the game’s third full campaign, the studio Yacht Club Games releases Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove, which gathers all the content produced for the game so far:

• Shovel of Hope: The new name of the original campaign, following the journey of the hero who gives the game its name.
• Plague of Shadows: The campaign of the villain Plague Knight, an ingenious alchemist.
• Specter of Torment: The campaign of the villain Specter Knight and his soul-reaping scythe.

Story: 9.5

Each Shovel Knight campaign tells a different but related story.
– Shovel of Hope follows Shovel Knight, an honorable knight who must face the Enchantress and the band of Knights she corrupted, while also dealing with the loss of his great friend and companion, Shield Knight.
– Plague of Shadows follows Plague Knight, one of the knights of the Enchantress’s band, who tries to take advantage of his colleagues to achieve his personal goals.
– Specter of Torment serves as a prologue to the main campaign, showing Specter Knight recruiting the knights to join the Enchantress’s group of villains.

The premise of each campaign is quite simple at first sight, but each story develops well and all have surprising revelations and events. The characters are charismatic, easy to like, and the dialogue is well written and funny.

Mechanics: 10

Shovel Knight has precise controls and masterful level design, which makes it technical and makes it clear that any death is entirely the player’s responsibility. The game gives up the traditional life counter and adopts a punishment system inspired by Dark Souls, leaving part of your money at the place of your last death. There is also a mechanic that gives the player the freedom to adjust the level’s difficulty at will: in a balance between risk and reward, you can destroy checkpoints to receive considerable money bonuses.

Despite sharing the same basic mechanics, each character has a quite different style and gameplay:
– Shovel Knight is well balanced and technical. His shovel is used as a weapon and as a tool to clear the way. His ability to attack downward during jumps (taken directly from DuckTales) enables very challenging platforming passages.
– Plague Knight is the weakest and slowest of the playable characters, using his ingenuity to overcome obstacles. In-game, this translates into powers like a double jump, ranged attacks and a charged blast (which can be used to perform another jump).
– Specter Knight is the most agile and has the most aggressive play style. With him, the player will run up walls, jump from one wall to another and use a homing attack (similar to the Homing Attack in modern Sonic games) to hit enemies in the air and move around the map with great style. Practically a ninja!

Each character has a high degree of customization available. There are alternate armors that grant bonuses or special abilities. There is also a selection of relics for each character, which can be used as special attacks (some taken directly from Castlevania).

Also, playing on the Switch I had the chance to try the brand-new co-op mode! In it, two Shovel Knights advance together, facing enemies with double the health and coordinating their positions and timing to allow higher or longer jumps than normal. Resources are shared, avoiding unnecessary competitiveness.
When one of the players dies, he loses part of the team’s resources (which remain on the map to be collected) and can revive immediately, but with half of the other player’s current health. A team that doesn’t work well together won’t progress through the stage and will end up wasting its time and gold, but a team that knows how to cooperate will win faster and even more fun victories!

Audiovisual: 10

Think of your favorite NES game. The visuals, colors and music seem perfect in our memory, but the limitations of the consoles of the time make everything a little less bright in reality.

Shovel Knight perfectly emulates everything we remember as good from that era. The game brings pixelated sprites and scenery and simple but incredibly addictive music, and it does so using technology to add a polish that would have been impossible 20 years ago.
Yes, the visuals use pixels – but there is an immense variety of colors (instead of the few allowed by 8-bit consoles), there are parallax effects in the scenery and an uncountable number of particles rendered simultaneously.
Yes, the music uses chiptune – but with many more sound channels than a 20-year-old console could play, and without the need to mute an instrument whenever the game has to play a sound effect.
The game does everything to give us the experience we remember, masking all the problems we tend to forget thanks to the nostalgia factor.

Final Thoughts:

Shovel Knight inherits style and mechanics from many sources, both classic and modern, joining them harmoniously into an experience with its own identity. The game reproduces everything that was good and memorable in the classics of our past, but without fear of modernizing and improving what didn’t work so well. Beneath this thin layer of retro sounds and visuals, there is a solid, modern game with impeccable design and finish.

In my humble opinion, the best indie of all time.

SCORE

Story = 9.5
Mechanics = 10
Audiovisual = 10

OVERALL: 9.9

Version: Nintendo Switch