𝗦𝗛𝗢𝗩𝗘𝗟 𝗢𝗙 𝗛𝗢𝗣𝗘: All time classic. Yatch Club perfectly captured the nostalgia and charm of the 8-bit era with their first outing. Listening to the amazing retro soundtrack and seeing the beautiful pixel art gave me pure serotonin. Im usually not sold on these types of 8-bit era throwback games, because they are usually all style no substance, but shovel knight does it right and then some. I also appreciated the simple but effective story. Seeing shield knight sit beside shovel knight and then seeing ''THE END'' text gave me goose bumps:

𝗣𝗟𝗔𝗚𝗨𝗘 𝗢𝗙 𝗦𝗛𝗔𝗗𝗢𝗪𝗦: Great expansion to shovel of hope and the story is charming as always. Compared to other expansion Plague knight doesnt have his own levels, instead he plays through a slightly altered versions of shovel knights stages and it works surprisingly well. They are a blast to playthrough with plagues knights new bomb burst move. Since the levels werent designed to counteract this mechanic, you can fly through stages if you know what you are doing and it is amazing. I also loved how you can make your own flasks by combining different cases, powders etc. Even though this is the least innovative out of all the expansions it is also the most underrated in my opinion. I would recommend you play this right after shovel of hope since this acts more of a expanded game to that.

𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗢𝗙 𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧: Oh boy here it is, the most innovative, the most unique and most importantly my favorite of them all. It expands on the original more than plague of shadows ever dared. What we have here is fully original levels designed around brand new mechanics. Specter knight has a taller stature compred to others and occupies a lot of space in the screen but his stature only adds to his power fantasy while not hindering his controls. It just feels so smooth to control with him seemlessly dashing around and wall jumping like its nothing. Your arsenal is more entriquet than ever, you can hover, heal yourself, summon skeletons, you can even slow down time. Its honestly the best in terms of gameplay and its not even a challenge. The only actual kinda downgrade i could point out here is that you have lots of options in terms how you approach fighting enemies and almost all of these options are overpowered in some shape or form. The bosses are a cakewalk because of this and even without all these options, specter knights base kit still demolishes them. The reason i wouldnt consider this a total downside because you get to play as the grimm reaper himself demolishing foes seemlessly and the power fantasy you experience is enough to justify it. The story takes a shift from plague of shadows and shovel of hopes more happy and non serious tone while still having moments that made outright laugh. The games shows you little snipets of how specter knight turned out the way he is. Blinded by greed, he killed his best friend and himself and made a deal with the enchantress in the past to return his humanity back. In the end, in a final act of selflessness he returns the humanity of his best friend's son instead of himself and lives as a slave to the enchantress. Brand new levels, brand new mechanics, and a tragic story to boot. This is game is truly amazing

𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗢𝗙 𝗖𝗔𝗥𝗗𝗦: I have not much to say on this. Its again a great expansion but coming from the greatness of specter of torment, this felt a bit underwhelming. My biggiest complaint here is the bite size approach to levels. All of them are original and there are lots of them also but all of them are pretty short and feel like they dont contribute to anything. There arent even any bosses at the end of levels. You instead encounter bosses in the overworld which is fine i guess. In terms of mechanics, king knight is a character defined by his limitations more than anything. He has one shoulder bash move and everything is built around that mechanic. It never got too creative with how the levels utilise the shoulder bash but simply bashing into enemies and spinning right afterwards to bounce on stuff constantly is a addicting enough gameplay loop. I never tried out the card game so i cant comment on that. This is a innovative enough expansion with some solid levels to boot but it was obvious from the start that it was never gonna reach the high bar specter of torment set up. My least favorite expansion of them all. Doesnt mean its bad though.

𝗢𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗔𝗟𝗟: Playing these 4 games in the order of SOT > KOC > POS > SOH and experiencing the full story of shovel knight start to finish. Seeing the special message you get after finishing all the expansions. I can safely say the combined experience of shovel knight is one of the greatest 2D platformers ever, up there with the likes of hollow knight and ori. Yatch club truly knocked it out off the park and marked themselves as one of the greats in the video game industry. I truly love this game

𝓢𝓣𝓔𝓔𝓛 𝓣𝓗𝓨 𝓢𝓗𝓞𝓥𝓔𝓛!

My expectations were high with this one. After playing the masterpiece that is the forgotten land, my hunger for more kirby led me to this game. It was the kirby game i heard the most about alongside super star ultra. Needless to say, i was left underwhelmed. First of all, the game went by too quickly. I dont know how many hours i had (2 hours at most probably) but i completed the game in 2.5 play sessions. Each area took about 20 minutes to complete and there are only 6 of them in the game. The bosses in this game kinda suck too. I dont have too much problems with their designs overall, but they get defeated too quickly to have any fun fighting them and i just really wished there were more bosses that utilised the robobot armor. The final boss, Presiden Haltmann, is a damage sponge that shifts in and out, off the screen too frequently so it just a wild goose chase to damage him after he is done attacking. The final phase against star dream not utilising the robobot armor and just being a underwhelming, gimmick shooter offended me on a personal level. The saving grace of this game is the level design. This is where the robobot armor and the game in general shines the most. Almost all of them are ablast to play through with banger music accompanying them. I would also talk about how almost nothing happens in the plot until the peak end of the game but thats a issue that plagues every kirby game so i cant complain. What i can complain about is how it doesnt cover the tragic story behind president haltmann and susie.
Overall, this is still a good kirby game. I may have been too harsh on it because of my high expectations after playing forgotten land, but i still like it at the end of the day. Its kirby, how could you NOT like it?

Well here is my first ACTUAL review. Here goes nothing

Oneshot was my favorite video game of all time for the longest time i can remember. It was the first game that made me invested in its world, story and characters. It defined what video games should be for me. Up until that point, the only genre of games i would play were platformers / metroidvanias. So when i decided to try this game out on a whim, it all hit me like a truck. It was weird for me to play a game didn't have any kind of gameplay mechanics basically. The only sort of gameplay you have in this game is, combining your items from your inventory and using it somewhere. There are also some fourth wall break puzzles too but thats about it really. But despite this game being the opposite of what i liked in video games up until that point. The one thing that kept me going was the game's protagonist, Niko.

Niko isn't just a blank slate you instert yourself upon so you feel ''more immersed''. He is more or less, a puppet. We control him, but only his actions, not his emotions. So the only control we have over him is controlling where he goes and what he does . Throught the game, you communicate with him in a literal sense, having conversations etc. During the game, he asks you silly but endearing questions like if we ever ate pancakes, or if there is a sun in our world. We also watch him have these endearing interactions with other characters as well. We dont really have that much control, we watch him meet with all these endearing cast of characters and then telling us how nice and kind they were. this is Niko's journey, not ours. Watching him eventually getting used to the world around and the circumstances of it all, and us emotionally supporting him through it all, telling him everything's going to be fine and he will go home. A little kid with the literal god of this world on his side trying to save the world. So, after all this, at the end of the game we learn that the only way to save niko is to, destroy the world you and niko grew to love so much and were determined to save, and only way for the world to be saved, is by niko sacrificing himself. Niko stays silent and ask us for help on what he should do and says he trust us. If we chose to save the world, Niko says we are right and that he cant leave everyone here to die and thanks us for everything. When we try to boot up the game after this, it shows us Niko's room with a faint glimmer of light from the window.

There are many aspects of this game i didnt talk about and probably failed to talk about. This game means so much to me, it defined my taste in video games and is still defining it, to this day. But i mainly wanted to talk about the aspect of the game that made it really special for me. Its not my favorite video game of all time anymore, since i fell in love with other video games that i simply like more than this one but this wont change the fact that this game defines what i like in video games, loveable characters, immersive worlds, and most important of all, Emotion and passion being put into it