Vidya-games! One in particular really: Shovel Knight! Excuse me while I use every excuse to write out Shovel Knight, just so I can hear it again in my head. I mean, just say it. Shoooooovel Knight. It’s, like, “cellar door,” but for videogame titles.
Shovel Knight.
Anyway, Shovel Knight is a retro-throwback game on 3DS that’s been making a lot of waves recently, mainly because calling it both retro and a throwback is warranted. Plenty of titles over the last decade have tried to emulate the experience of playing an original NES game simply by imitating the look (thanks in part to an increasingly loose definition of “8-bit graphics”), but it’s the gameplay that matters most, which Shovel Knight absolutely nails, thus earning the title of legitimate throwback.
A frothy mix of Castlevania and Megaman, with just a little Super Mario that snuck in while no one was looking, Shovel Knight is a 2D adventure platformer that tasks the player with guiding the eponymous gallant gardener with traversing a dozen-or-so levels filled with traps, spikes, pitfalls and enemies, all leading up to boss encounters with knights of similarly over-specific categorization. Personally, Polar Knight was my favorite of the motely villains making up the Order of No Quarter (again, great name), seeing as he’s an oversized Viking that wields a snow shovel.
In true NES fashion, the controls are pixel perfect: wherever you want Shovel Knight to go, he can, provided you have dexterous enough thumbs to input the controls correctly. Shovel Knight is never a cheat when it comes to difficulty, which is perhaps where it helpfully adds a little modernization to the nostalgic love-fest. Checkpoints are frequent enough to make stages challenging but not maddening, and the game’s death penalty is forgiving enough to make failure something you want to avoid as a matter of pride, not lost progress.
The soundtrack is absolutely terrific, and the old school palette and pixels are just the outer coat of some really gorgeous presentation. Many of the boss characters move with exaggerated animations, and the town’s people scattered about your adventures are a lively assortment of oddballs. Most memorable of the bunch is The Troupple King, an excessively large figure of piscine royalty that’s half apple, half trout, all Troupple. He even dances.
Shovel Knight’s personality is often its strongest asset, eschewing elbow-in-ribs references to other games or bottom-feeding internet humor for a world crafted with honest to god inspiration. Even in the game’s archaic premise of trying to save the damsel, Shovel Knight finds ways to remix the formula that preserves the classic feel of a NES game, while smartly updating the design for modern standards. It took less than 6 hours to shovel my way to victory, but at a $15 asking price, this is a no-brainer.
Shovel Knight!