Yacht Club Games has made a comfortable living plagiarizing the Darkstar Skateboards mascot guy for close to a decade - and thats probably the only reason why they never slapped Shovel Knight on skateboard merch or licensed a cameo of him to Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5.
(More below)
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Im gonna be upfront: Shovel Knight irritated me for a long time. There was a period during the early twenty-tens of what I might call "Retro Essentialism" - the idea that only classic games could offer fun and interesting experiences. At this point, that was a long time ago, things have moved on. I think the gaming landscape has cultured a bit more, I think the scope of my experience is much wider now.
So after finally finishing the last Shovel Knight campaign (King of Cards) nearly 8ish years after Shovel Knight originally released, I think I wanna talk about:
- The essentiality of Shovel Knights retro-aesthetics
- How the campaigns evolved from one iteration to the next.
- Thoughts on remixing one game for 8 years
- Shovel Knights commitments to its inspirations
And as always, I consider these aspects under 4 key questions:
o
What is Fun about Shovel Knight?
If Im being honest, this is where Ill be the most harsh on Shovel Knight and its various campaigns: with the exception of Plague Knight, nearly all of Shovel Knights platforming feels like its comprised of arbitrary restrictions and funky platforming flow. King Knight cant do a second shoulder charge until after he pogos once (and you cannot pogo without shoulder charging first), Spectre Knight requires other objects to be able to platform at all 80% of the time, and Shovel Knight himself is just slow Ducktales (likely the original inspiration).
Not that theres anything inherently "flawed" with that but I think the result is that the game feels very unintuitive sometimes, actively inhibiting a flow state - and its easy to compare experiences here cuz Plague Knight feels the opposite. Plague Knight is all about launching himself with explosions, and while this still comes with a similar set of mechanical restrictions they are much more logical and natural-feeling. Plague Knight could work in any level you put him in, King Knight and Spectre Knight can only work in curated spaces designed to support their play concepts - and you can definitely feel that.
Two things make up another major component of each of the character campaigns: what Ill call “Accessories” and Upgrades. “Accessories” are secondary items (Relics, Arcana, Curios, Heirlooms) with a wide range of uses: from traversal, to different kinds of attacks, etc. “Upgrades” covers all the various things each character can purchase for themselves, such as armor variants, health increases, etc. While this whole system adds a small RPG like depth to the game, Yacht Club has a habit of making some of them FAR more useful than others in ALL situations. Im all for diegetic difficulty assignment but some of these feel like get-out-of-jail free cards when paired with the clunky restrictions on character actions - need what feels like 10 seconds (exaggeration) of invincibility for any tough spot Shovel Knight runs into? Rats that save you whenever King Knight accidentally shoulder charges in an area where he cant follow the action up with a bounce? Should Hard Mode be the characters base gameplay? Elements of accessories and armor upgrades were fine-tuned a bit by King of Cards - but idk. These things laid out on paper dont sound very attractive to me, but maybe Im crazy.
I think the truly worst thing to me tho, as a fan of Mega Man (a clear inspiration here) is how disappointing the Boss behaviors are. Considering the Knights of No Quarter are featured in all of the character campaigns, their design quirks impact the campaigns all equally. These mfers are zip-zapping and bob-bappin all over the room in what feels like completely random order - but more to the issue, they move and react in ways that feel nearly indifferent to the actions the player is taking. Sure, for the characters that pogo, bosses might cover their head in response, but at best the game offers a very tacit reaction. Victory often feels like an accident, just a series of fortunate (or unfortunate) moves that caused them to take more hits than you did - and many player attacks will accidentally hit the boss like 2 or 3 times just as a result of the physics interactions. Thankfully, the bigger setpiece bosses feel alot more intentional, and the original bosses created for the later campaigns tend to feel slightly better designed - but not by much. It just feels sloppy. It feels like an afterthought. It doesnt feel good when it doesnt feel like I can reach positive outcomes with much volition.
I labor over all these points to say: theres an issue with cohesion here. These things arent even that bad - I think a fair bit of the time they dont get in the way of classic feeling platforming. But theyre just not great, theyre un-aspirational, theyre disappointing. Its like several good foods that dont go together, or that arent put together very thoughtfully. You wanna know what some of the best gameplay is in Shovel Knight? Its the fuckin card game in King of Cards, the card-playing sections in a platformer. Why is Plague Knight several leagues better than the other 3 gameplay styles, how do you accidentally make excellent platforming mechanics? Like its not especially important that Shovel Knight is not The Best Platformer Ive Ever Played but Im also definitely gonna express that opinion about it.
One thing I think is consistently fun and thoughtful about Shovel Knight across all the various campaigns tho, just to balance this section out a tiny bit: the Progression systems. Yacht Club spent alot of time making sure this aspect of the game was fresh and inventive so that each campaign was sufficiently distinct and engaging and I think it worked. The things youre investing in during Spectre of Torment will be slightly different to the upgrades and items at your disposal in Shovel of Hope or King of Cards, especially considering the card game Joustus. It lends purpose to all the secret chests and hidden collectables and even just the notion of risking your neck for big gems. I have no notes here, its a fun time as far as progression is concerned.
o
What is Shovel Knights Vibe?
Unlike the Fun section I think I mostly have good things to say about Shovel Knights vibe. Most readily its best quality is its character. I dont think I appreciated it so much for Shovel of Hope when it originally released but playing as hapless villains in a world full of apple-trouts and zany village people and minions is a very charming experience. But this also balloons out into an internally consistent world over time. I dont think making the same game 4 times did any favors for the game designers but the writers could really take their time building a rapport for the players to take roots in. As much as it doesnt matter, seeing King Knight, in full golden Knight garb, begging his mom to stop flirting with another king is just very endearing for a character youve fought like half a dozen times in the past decade.
It is of course, also important to mention Shovel Knights dedication to NES hardware limitations in its art and music direction. Now Im not a hardware enthusiast, so Im not the person to ask about how faithful it adheres to NES constraints - but I can say its very clear Yacht Club enjoys using those limitations in incredibly expressive ways. Especially where environments are concerned, having 4 campaigns worth of locations and transitions and backgrounds adds up to an incredibly lush world constructed with nothing but limited color palettes and authentic parallaxing rules. In 2014 it seemed pretentious to suggest “new games cant look good, were going back in time” but after a whole decade its stopped feeling like a retro aesthetic and has started feeling like Shovel Knights own personal charm. Its weird to say but its less like "NES graphics" and more like "this is what shovel-medieval games look like".
I think its worth noting the range of tones here between the 4 campaigns also. While of course, there are wacky elements present in each, each campaign has its own thrust, its own flavor. Shovel of Hope has a sort of adventurous, lonesome yearning to it as Shovel Knight struggles against the Knights of No Quarter to save his fair Shield Knight. Plague of Shadows however has a sort of manic clandestine feeling to it as Plague Knight returns to his secret chemistry lab scheming to make the ultimate potion. Spectre of Torment is a story of loss, regret, betrayal, and self loathing with a gothic twist as you play as the ghoul Spectre Knight. And of course King of Cards is an absurd satire of kingly-ness as the man-child King Knight attempts to earn a crown and a kingdom by winning (cheating) his way through a card game tournament gone wrong. Yacht Club deserves the credit for really taking care to make sure each campaign could stand on their own (which was probably necessary considering the risk they were running of just making the same game 4 times(and also probably why started charging for them separately even tho these were Kickstarter stretch goals originally))
o
What is Impressive about Shovel Knight?
As much as working on one single title for such a long time feels like a bit of a privilege and a maybe creatively safe move from the company, I think the result speaks well for Yacht Club. I think there were even safer, easier routes they could have taken if all they wanted to do was cash in, so I think its impressive to some degree that they took the opportunity to make the Shovel Knight campaigns a little bit special and unique. Im not gonna give them ALL the credit here, cuz respectable game releases should be the norm and not the exception - but its commendable all the same.
Likewise, I touched on this in the Vibes section but I do find it impressive that they held to Shovel Knights retro inspirations, honoring the creative exercise the whole way through. Their collaborations on the spinoffs, Pocket Dungeon and Dig, dont follow the same sort of restrictions and I think it was very responsible by keeping these projects separate. Its admirable, the creative discipline on Yacht Clubs part to compartmentalize these commitments so well.
But beyond that, it has to be said: they have probably wrung the NES platformer angle pretty dry by this point. Some of the fun lil quirky tricks they mimicked were novel in 2014 have become background noise in 2023. As fun as Joustus is to play, it very clearly has no analogue in the NES library and its evident Yacht Club was maybe ready to move on to new ideas and inspirations.
I also feel compelled to mention boss design here as a disappointment. Ive tried not to whinge about it too much as I suspect my issue might be partially preference - maybe its perfectly faithful to NES platformer boss dynamics of old. That hasnt been my experience, but maybe Im just unfamiliar with some larger trend during the NES days. What I can say tho, is that even in that case its still just not as fun. Even just within the game of Shovel Knight, the bosses are the low point of the content compared to the general level design and the larger bosses. This is a waste of potential, cuz I think the character design is fun. The fights simply dont do them justice and as it stands, the main benefit of their inclusion is merely to pay tribute to something else.
o
What is Interesting about Shovel Knight?
I think Shovel Knight is most interesting as a sort of case study: Does the NES approach hold up more than once? How do you iterate 4 times on one gameplay concept? If new ideas come up during the course of a long term project, how to integrate those, how do you make a pivot that is sensible and responsible? Its clear that Shovel of Hope and Plague of Shadows were made in the same framework but something changed heading into Spectre of Torment. The dramatic shift in storytelling as well as the advent of the "Treasure Trove" pricing model were unexpected, especially for what were originally stretch goal - so it must be that new ideas incubated as they worked on them and a new direction emerged.
Also noted in the Vibes section, but another pretty interesting thing is seeing how Shovel Knight grew around its core aesthetics and concepts as time went on. In 2023, for me, its presentation went from "silly game tributing classics with a retro art style" to the art style feeling like it represents some sort of historical view of a land with knights and fairies - like somehow 12th century Europe had been historically represented in 8 and 16 bit images or something like that. That “old graphics” and “ye olden times” would be adjacent enough to each other to bleed over. Its a very interesting sense of transposition, that the influence would work in both ways somehow. Pretty cool (entirely accidental).
o
Closing Thoughts
Something I wanted to keep kinda separate from the review of the game, was the acclaim Shovel Knight got the year it was released. Notable for being one of the most successful Kickstarters ever, for some people Shovel Knight might as well have been made by Nintendo themselves. Famously, Shovel Knight himself has made something like 30+ cameos in other games, even managing to score a cameo in Super Smash Bros. This would also seem to corroborate the fact that Yacht Club has been sustainable with Shovel Knight being their only project for such a long time.
So its interesting to see the future follow-up to Shovel Knight, Mina the Hollower, not receiving quite as fervent a following. From what I can tell its kickstarter received support, it doesnt seem like itll flop - but it doesnt seem to have made the same wave that Shovel Knight did. Compare to the people out here that might sincerely kill someone for a drop of news about Silksong (the sequel to the suspiciously similarly titled Hollow Knight). It makes me wonder if it was something of a fluke - and tts just interesting to sit here and ponder what the shape of Shovel Knight looks like half an age later. I know for me Shovel Knight was only ever an alright game, but I wonder if Shovel Knight will still seem like the best game ever made to people another half-age into the future. It seems to me like Yacht Club will have to move on at some point, inevitably. But for me I think Im ready to close the chapter on the original Shovel Knight. I wonder if Pocket Dungeon and Dig will hold up as well.
(More below)
v
v
v
v
Im gonna be upfront: Shovel Knight irritated me for a long time. There was a period during the early twenty-tens of what I might call "Retro Essentialism" - the idea that only classic games could offer fun and interesting experiences. At this point, that was a long time ago, things have moved on. I think the gaming landscape has cultured a bit more, I think the scope of my experience is much wider now.
So after finally finishing the last Shovel Knight campaign (King of Cards) nearly 8ish years after Shovel Knight originally released, I think I wanna talk about:
- The essentiality of Shovel Knights retro-aesthetics
- How the campaigns evolved from one iteration to the next.
- Thoughts on remixing one game for 8 years
- Shovel Knights commitments to its inspirations
And as always, I consider these aspects under 4 key questions:
o
What is Fun about Shovel Knight?
If Im being honest, this is where Ill be the most harsh on Shovel Knight and its various campaigns: with the exception of Plague Knight, nearly all of Shovel Knights platforming feels like its comprised of arbitrary restrictions and funky platforming flow. King Knight cant do a second shoulder charge until after he pogos once (and you cannot pogo without shoulder charging first), Spectre Knight requires other objects to be able to platform at all 80% of the time, and Shovel Knight himself is just slow Ducktales (likely the original inspiration).
Not that theres anything inherently "flawed" with that but I think the result is that the game feels very unintuitive sometimes, actively inhibiting a flow state - and its easy to compare experiences here cuz Plague Knight feels the opposite. Plague Knight is all about launching himself with explosions, and while this still comes with a similar set of mechanical restrictions they are much more logical and natural-feeling. Plague Knight could work in any level you put him in, King Knight and Spectre Knight can only work in curated spaces designed to support their play concepts - and you can definitely feel that.
Two things make up another major component of each of the character campaigns: what Ill call “Accessories” and Upgrades. “Accessories” are secondary items (Relics, Arcana, Curios, Heirlooms) with a wide range of uses: from traversal, to different kinds of attacks, etc. “Upgrades” covers all the various things each character can purchase for themselves, such as armor variants, health increases, etc. While this whole system adds a small RPG like depth to the game, Yacht Club has a habit of making some of them FAR more useful than others in ALL situations. Im all for diegetic difficulty assignment but some of these feel like get-out-of-jail free cards when paired with the clunky restrictions on character actions - need what feels like 10 seconds (exaggeration) of invincibility for any tough spot Shovel Knight runs into? Rats that save you whenever King Knight accidentally shoulder charges in an area where he cant follow the action up with a bounce? Should Hard Mode be the characters base gameplay? Elements of accessories and armor upgrades were fine-tuned a bit by King of Cards - but idk. These things laid out on paper dont sound very attractive to me, but maybe Im crazy.
I think the truly worst thing to me tho, as a fan of Mega Man (a clear inspiration here) is how disappointing the Boss behaviors are. Considering the Knights of No Quarter are featured in all of the character campaigns, their design quirks impact the campaigns all equally. These mfers are zip-zapping and bob-bappin all over the room in what feels like completely random order - but more to the issue, they move and react in ways that feel nearly indifferent to the actions the player is taking. Sure, for the characters that pogo, bosses might cover their head in response, but at best the game offers a very tacit reaction. Victory often feels like an accident, just a series of fortunate (or unfortunate) moves that caused them to take more hits than you did - and many player attacks will accidentally hit the boss like 2 or 3 times just as a result of the physics interactions. Thankfully, the bigger setpiece bosses feel alot more intentional, and the original bosses created for the later campaigns tend to feel slightly better designed - but not by much. It just feels sloppy. It feels like an afterthought. It doesnt feel good when it doesnt feel like I can reach positive outcomes with much volition.
I labor over all these points to say: theres an issue with cohesion here. These things arent even that bad - I think a fair bit of the time they dont get in the way of classic feeling platforming. But theyre just not great, theyre un-aspirational, theyre disappointing. Its like several good foods that dont go together, or that arent put together very thoughtfully. You wanna know what some of the best gameplay is in Shovel Knight? Its the fuckin card game in King of Cards, the card-playing sections in a platformer. Why is Plague Knight several leagues better than the other 3 gameplay styles, how do you accidentally make excellent platforming mechanics? Like its not especially important that Shovel Knight is not The Best Platformer Ive Ever Played but Im also definitely gonna express that opinion about it.
One thing I think is consistently fun and thoughtful about Shovel Knight across all the various campaigns tho, just to balance this section out a tiny bit: the Progression systems. Yacht Club spent alot of time making sure this aspect of the game was fresh and inventive so that each campaign was sufficiently distinct and engaging and I think it worked. The things youre investing in during Spectre of Torment will be slightly different to the upgrades and items at your disposal in Shovel of Hope or King of Cards, especially considering the card game Joustus. It lends purpose to all the secret chests and hidden collectables and even just the notion of risking your neck for big gems. I have no notes here, its a fun time as far as progression is concerned.
o
What is Shovel Knights Vibe?
Unlike the Fun section I think I mostly have good things to say about Shovel Knights vibe. Most readily its best quality is its character. I dont think I appreciated it so much for Shovel of Hope when it originally released but playing as hapless villains in a world full of apple-trouts and zany village people and minions is a very charming experience. But this also balloons out into an internally consistent world over time. I dont think making the same game 4 times did any favors for the game designers but the writers could really take their time building a rapport for the players to take roots in. As much as it doesnt matter, seeing King Knight, in full golden Knight garb, begging his mom to stop flirting with another king is just very endearing for a character youve fought like half a dozen times in the past decade.
It is of course, also important to mention Shovel Knights dedication to NES hardware limitations in its art and music direction. Now Im not a hardware enthusiast, so Im not the person to ask about how faithful it adheres to NES constraints - but I can say its very clear Yacht Club enjoys using those limitations in incredibly expressive ways. Especially where environments are concerned, having 4 campaigns worth of locations and transitions and backgrounds adds up to an incredibly lush world constructed with nothing but limited color palettes and authentic parallaxing rules. In 2014 it seemed pretentious to suggest “new games cant look good, were going back in time” but after a whole decade its stopped feeling like a retro aesthetic and has started feeling like Shovel Knights own personal charm. Its weird to say but its less like "NES graphics" and more like "this is what shovel-medieval games look like".
I think its worth noting the range of tones here between the 4 campaigns also. While of course, there are wacky elements present in each, each campaign has its own thrust, its own flavor. Shovel of Hope has a sort of adventurous, lonesome yearning to it as Shovel Knight struggles against the Knights of No Quarter to save his fair Shield Knight. Plague of Shadows however has a sort of manic clandestine feeling to it as Plague Knight returns to his secret chemistry lab scheming to make the ultimate potion. Spectre of Torment is a story of loss, regret, betrayal, and self loathing with a gothic twist as you play as the ghoul Spectre Knight. And of course King of Cards is an absurd satire of kingly-ness as the man-child King Knight attempts to earn a crown and a kingdom by winning (cheating) his way through a card game tournament gone wrong. Yacht Club deserves the credit for really taking care to make sure each campaign could stand on their own (which was probably necessary considering the risk they were running of just making the same game 4 times(and also probably why started charging for them separately even tho these were Kickstarter stretch goals originally))
o
What is Impressive about Shovel Knight?
As much as working on one single title for such a long time feels like a bit of a privilege and a maybe creatively safe move from the company, I think the result speaks well for Yacht Club. I think there were even safer, easier routes they could have taken if all they wanted to do was cash in, so I think its impressive to some degree that they took the opportunity to make the Shovel Knight campaigns a little bit special and unique. Im not gonna give them ALL the credit here, cuz respectable game releases should be the norm and not the exception - but its commendable all the same.
Likewise, I touched on this in the Vibes section but I do find it impressive that they held to Shovel Knights retro inspirations, honoring the creative exercise the whole way through. Their collaborations on the spinoffs, Pocket Dungeon and Dig, dont follow the same sort of restrictions and I think it was very responsible by keeping these projects separate. Its admirable, the creative discipline on Yacht Clubs part to compartmentalize these commitments so well.
But beyond that, it has to be said: they have probably wrung the NES platformer angle pretty dry by this point. Some of the fun lil quirky tricks they mimicked were novel in 2014 have become background noise in 2023. As fun as Joustus is to play, it very clearly has no analogue in the NES library and its evident Yacht Club was maybe ready to move on to new ideas and inspirations.
I also feel compelled to mention boss design here as a disappointment. Ive tried not to whinge about it too much as I suspect my issue might be partially preference - maybe its perfectly faithful to NES platformer boss dynamics of old. That hasnt been my experience, but maybe Im just unfamiliar with some larger trend during the NES days. What I can say tho, is that even in that case its still just not as fun. Even just within the game of Shovel Knight, the bosses are the low point of the content compared to the general level design and the larger bosses. This is a waste of potential, cuz I think the character design is fun. The fights simply dont do them justice and as it stands, the main benefit of their inclusion is merely to pay tribute to something else.
o
What is Interesting about Shovel Knight?
I think Shovel Knight is most interesting as a sort of case study: Does the NES approach hold up more than once? How do you iterate 4 times on one gameplay concept? If new ideas come up during the course of a long term project, how to integrate those, how do you make a pivot that is sensible and responsible? Its clear that Shovel of Hope and Plague of Shadows were made in the same framework but something changed heading into Spectre of Torment. The dramatic shift in storytelling as well as the advent of the "Treasure Trove" pricing model were unexpected, especially for what were originally stretch goal - so it must be that new ideas incubated as they worked on them and a new direction emerged.
Also noted in the Vibes section, but another pretty interesting thing is seeing how Shovel Knight grew around its core aesthetics and concepts as time went on. In 2023, for me, its presentation went from "silly game tributing classics with a retro art style" to the art style feeling like it represents some sort of historical view of a land with knights and fairies - like somehow 12th century Europe had been historically represented in 8 and 16 bit images or something like that. That “old graphics” and “ye olden times” would be adjacent enough to each other to bleed over. Its a very interesting sense of transposition, that the influence would work in both ways somehow. Pretty cool (entirely accidental).
o
Closing Thoughts
Something I wanted to keep kinda separate from the review of the game, was the acclaim Shovel Knight got the year it was released. Notable for being one of the most successful Kickstarters ever, for some people Shovel Knight might as well have been made by Nintendo themselves. Famously, Shovel Knight himself has made something like 30+ cameos in other games, even managing to score a cameo in Super Smash Bros. This would also seem to corroborate the fact that Yacht Club has been sustainable with Shovel Knight being their only project for such a long time.
So its interesting to see the future follow-up to Shovel Knight, Mina the Hollower, not receiving quite as fervent a following. From what I can tell its kickstarter received support, it doesnt seem like itll flop - but it doesnt seem to have made the same wave that Shovel Knight did. Compare to the people out here that might sincerely kill someone for a drop of news about Silksong (the sequel to the suspiciously similarly titled Hollow Knight). It makes me wonder if it was something of a fluke - and tts just interesting to sit here and ponder what the shape of Shovel Knight looks like half an age later. I know for me Shovel Knight was only ever an alright game, but I wonder if Shovel Knight will still seem like the best game ever made to people another half-age into the future. It seems to me like Yacht Club will have to move on at some point, inevitably. But for me I think Im ready to close the chapter on the original Shovel Knight. I wonder if Pocket Dungeon and Dig will hold up as well.