Determined to do whatever it takes to rescue his beloved Shield Knight, Shovel Knight proceeds to clash against tough adversaries Plague Knight and Polar Knight in a battle of...

...whoever can get 12 gems first.


Yacht Club should really stick with platformers.

I can definitely see why this is many people's favorite Shovel Knight campaign. It's easily the most streamlined: it eliminates Shovel Knight's map and encounters, and simplifies the hub to a single location while keeping all the character found in these locations in the other games; it's not standing alongside Joustus or weapon management like King and Plague Knights' campaigns.

Specter Knight's kit manages to make for interesting, unique platforming that demands the player think about their positioning and how it impacts their movement options constantly. The stages are built near perfectly for his moveset, being challenging without ever being tedious in the way I found some moments in Plague Knight's run to be. Every stage is reasonably fair and approachable for Specter Knight at any point of the game...

...But I think that does make it a little flat, too. There's not as much of a difficulty curve in Specter of Torment as there is in the other games, and honestly, it almost feels too easy, between the main stages and the true final boss. I liked getting wrecked by Cardia and gradually getting the hang of Joustus in King of Cards, and just barely surviving my first bout against the final boss in Plague of Shadows - and I think this game doesn't have enough of those kinds of moments.

It's consistent, and compelling. The story's engaging (although it makes me wonder if Reize's creator bankrolled Yacht Club for it) and shows a gradual decline in redeemability for each of the Shovel Knight protagonists; I liked getting to see Shield Knight in her prime, although I think Yacht Club are better at making a plot than they are at telling a story, and the presentation suffers for it.

It's very, very polished, and very, very solid, but I don't know if I love it the way I love the other three Shovel Knight games. It's easily one of the best platformers I've played, right?

So why don't I find it as dear to my heart as the rest?

i don't like actual osu, catch the fruit would be fun with a tablet or touch screen, taiko is flaccid and

honestly? osu!mania is my favorite part of it.

i liked being able to play rhythm games to my favorite anime ops but at the end of the day, taiko's curated lists and maps are a lot more enjoyable.

shelved only because i want to go into at least some of it blind if i ever decide to stream this game

but wow. people think lost levels is bad? because, uh, this game honestly makes it look as well-designed and fair as the original

lost levels may be hard, but there's a very thoughtful, deliberate design to it that provides some of my favorite levels from any mario game.

this? its decisions are often off-putting, baffling as someone used to vanilla smb. firebars are out of sync, there's one-block gaps placed with almost no rhyme or reason, and there's enough placement changes to completely throw me off and make me die in places i never would in the original.

i've got to stream this just to show how absolutely bamboozled it makes me. like, wow. i'm in shock.

...but it's a super mario bros. game. i'm too masochistic with these to give it anything lower than a 3, honestly.

Crucified, buried, forgotten

for the sin of not having been Pac-Man World 2 2

perhaps rightly so.

okay, it must have been because platformers were becoming less common in this era
sonic started being a bit janky, mario was stepping away from pure platforming with sunshine, rare was nowhere to be seen, spyro and crash were slipping in quality

but i just can't understand why this game gets glorified as much as it does today.

it's just. a platformer? like, i can't think of anything this game particularly excels at aside from the music

I've made it past Episode 1 on the second lowest difficulty so far. It's honestly really satisfying gradually getting more confident about navigation, movement and combat as you slowly learn, from someone who's basically completely new to first person shooters as a whole.

I think the levels are too labyrinthine overall, though (especially after watching Doom Eternal, which seemed to have a much better balance of navigation and action), and I don't like how the game relied on darkness and low light to artificially increase the difficulty.
The music is great, though, and just the overall game feel is charming enough that I want to continue.

I almost want to say this game doesn't deserve the 4.0 score. After all, it's basically Knuckles in Sonic 2, right? This should have been just as janky as that, as unnecessary and unfitting as that, right?

Actually playing this was kind of a miserable experience, partly because I chose to get the Checkpointless achievement out of the way first so I wouldn't have to worry about it later.

Don't get me wrong: Plague Knight is extremely capable in battle. All of his Arcana having great utility for one situation or another, and while all the customizations for his bombs and burst are a tiny bit excessive, they still extend his capabilities considerably.

Yet why is that despite all of this, a double jump, a burst and a Vat of all things, Plague Knight has awful, janky mobility?

I suffered through replaying the entirety of Mole Knight and Plague Knight's stages over and over again for a few days straight. Obstacles that I faced little difficulty with as Shovel Knight would stump me so much, and it was always dreadful making it through the majority of those stages knowing that the thing near the end that killed me the last time was right around the corner... and it was probably going to kill me this time too.

I wish his campaign was as different from Shovel Knight's as King Knight's and (as far as I know,) Specter Knight's. I wish his had come later, so that they could have applied their newfound philosophy of making the campaigns their own full-fledged games here. They could have had made levels that more directly relate to Plague Knight's moveset; they could have paced the story out better and had more time to develop it, like with King Knight; they could have made it all work better.

But the second Shovel Knight campaign had questions to answer, like how Shovel Knight's victory over the Enchantress managed to break Shovel Knight free despite others having won against her before, and how the Tower of Fate came to collapse; Plague Knight was the only one of the three who could fill that role, with King Knight and Specter Knight's stories having concluded before Shovel Knight's had even begun.

And I'm glad that Plague Knight was the one who got to answer those questions, and to redeem himself in the process. And at the end of the day, his romance is still more engaging and endearing than Shovel Knight's, as awkwardly paced as it was. And I'm glad in a way that he manages to make it through Shovel Knight's stages relatively unscathed, because it stands as a testament to how good that level design was in the first place.

So as mixed as I feel about Plague of Shadows... I can't help but like it.

After all, Plague and Mona really are pretty cute together.

EDIT 02/04/21: ...yeah, no, okay, the game's a lot more tolerable with checkpoints, and with a better understanding of what to do the whole time through. I take it back - it deserves the 4.

It's an interesting game. My review of it is going to be slanted because I played it with save states, but its actual accomplishments are interesting, like how it has cutscenes between levels that tell a story, or how it manages to establish a sort of consistency in location across stages 5-3, 5-4 and 6-1.

The wall jump and climb made for interesting vertical movement compared to most (non-Mario) platformers of the era, and the special weapon reminds me of Castlevania in its potential for good strategization.

But it's also brutal for some reason - enemy patterns are often impossible to react to when rushing, making players have to take their time in front of tricky jumps often, which is counter-intuitive for a game that actually has very tight time limits.

Other parts of levels seem to be there just to punish the player for not being familiar with the level design and enemy placement (why do enemies drop down from nowhere right onto the spot you're expected to be sometimes?), and end up emphasizing trial and error play...

That, coupled with the fact that even death seems to send players back to 6-1 after losing to any of the bosses found on the level, ages the game slightly more than it should have, in my opinion.

But hey, that's what Cyber Shadow is going to be for, right?