It's hard for me to know whether to treat the four games enclosed in this package as separate works or individual pieces of a grander whole, as the reality feels somewhere halfway between those two extremes. They each largely work as their own self-contained entries, but also reflect on one another, reuse systems and content, and in one case outright reuse levels.
Broadly the Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove collection is a very solid package. Most notably I love the aesthetic, visually the game harkens back to the NES capturing that 8-bit graphical style but beautifying it substantially. Similarly the music bops along like the best Mega Man tracks, though perhaps struggles to be as consistently engaging by the time you're hearing all these tracks fourth time round. This kind of speaks to an issue I have with this package in general which is that for me it struggled at points to maintain itself for the 20+ hour playtime involved in completing all four games; playing the whole collection at once now is likely a very different experience to playing one entry every couple years as they were made.
The gameplay can be more of a mixed bag, though is generally really solid. The boss fights are a highlight, and the game has a lot of creativity constantly throwing new ideas at you. I'm not really in love with how many challenges ultimately just boil down to there being insta-death surfaces, nor the extent to which enemies can sometimes only be threatening due to their ability to chip-shot you down into the abyss (this is by far at its worst with Plague Knight where many deaths just feel cheap).
I think the original Shovel Knight experience stands out as the strongest entry due to being the most balanced, and also thanks to its very charming writing. Whilst Plague of Shadows continues this charm it struggles along as the weakest entry due to Plague Knight's awkward movement, the over-complicated bomb-design options and the recycled level designs; if the writing wasn't so good the game would have fallen completely flat for me.
Specter of Torment and King of Cards both suffer a bit from feeling unbalanced; all the special abilities you can get being optional means the game can't really be designed with them in mind, so a handful of them just break the game in half and trivialise a lot of the challenges. That said these two games feature the most satisfying movement of this collection. I particularly love how King Knight's movement patterns turn getting from A to B into its own little puzzle at times and think King of Cards actually has the strongest platforming to be found here (sadly brought down by the weakest writing, and the thankfully-largely-optional card game Joustus being not-very-good).
If I was to rate each entry separately it would look something like;
Shovel Knight; 8/10
Plague of Shadows; 6/10
Specter of Torment; 7/10
King of Cards; 7/10
Broadly the Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove collection is a very solid package. Most notably I love the aesthetic, visually the game harkens back to the NES capturing that 8-bit graphical style but beautifying it substantially. Similarly the music bops along like the best Mega Man tracks, though perhaps struggles to be as consistently engaging by the time you're hearing all these tracks fourth time round. This kind of speaks to an issue I have with this package in general which is that for me it struggled at points to maintain itself for the 20+ hour playtime involved in completing all four games; playing the whole collection at once now is likely a very different experience to playing one entry every couple years as they were made.
The gameplay can be more of a mixed bag, though is generally really solid. The boss fights are a highlight, and the game has a lot of creativity constantly throwing new ideas at you. I'm not really in love with how many challenges ultimately just boil down to there being insta-death surfaces, nor the extent to which enemies can sometimes only be threatening due to their ability to chip-shot you down into the abyss (this is by far at its worst with Plague Knight where many deaths just feel cheap).
I think the original Shovel Knight experience stands out as the strongest entry due to being the most balanced, and also thanks to its very charming writing. Whilst Plague of Shadows continues this charm it struggles along as the weakest entry due to Plague Knight's awkward movement, the over-complicated bomb-design options and the recycled level designs; if the writing wasn't so good the game would have fallen completely flat for me.
Specter of Torment and King of Cards both suffer a bit from feeling unbalanced; all the special abilities you can get being optional means the game can't really be designed with them in mind, so a handful of them just break the game in half and trivialise a lot of the challenges. That said these two games feature the most satisfying movement of this collection. I particularly love how King Knight's movement patterns turn getting from A to B into its own little puzzle at times and think King of Cards actually has the strongest platforming to be found here (sadly brought down by the weakest writing, and the thankfully-largely-optional card game Joustus being not-very-good).
If I was to rate each entry separately it would look something like;
Shovel Knight; 8/10
Plague of Shadows; 6/10
Specter of Torment; 7/10
King of Cards; 7/10