Game Discussion of the Week: Shovel Knight

Medieval Mega Man.

It's not just a really well designed platformer and one of the best modern uses of 8-bit aesthetics, but also the poster child of how to treat well your fans. See, the base game is already longer than its inspirations, but then the developers decided that they would keep adding content for free. At first, they added a playable boss character with his own story, and it worked more or less like Mega Man Powered up (same levels from the main game but with a new way to traverse them); then, when they added other character, it had entirely new levels, although the campaign was a bit shorter; then, they added yet another character, and for this one they not only made completely new levels and story again, but also created a very fun and deep card game (think of the card game in Final Fantasy 8). I swear that King Knight's campaign is longer than Shovel Knight's, at least when trying to get everything. And they also added a versus mode!

So I bought this game just once, years ago, and I'm still playing it, and there's still much to see (I haven't even beaten the versus mode or done any of the new game plus campaigns). There's just a lot of content, the most that I've seen in an indie game of this style. If we are going to compare to NES Mega Man, this is the equivalent of combining three or four of those games in one (taking into consideration the longest ones, like Mega Man 3).

The gameplay is just a lot of fun with any of the four characters. Besides the precise physics/movement from a Mega Man game, the bouncing mechanics reminiscent from Duck Tales are very well done (two of the characters rely on bouncing, while the other two are all about double and triple jumps and wall running). The game also has a lot of personality, with a very detailed art style and animation.

All that said, there's a side of me that would prefer that Yacht Club games didn't spend so much time adding content to the game: because while I obviously love all of it and got it all for free, I keep thinking what kind of work they would have done already if they were making a sequel or an entirely new game. Whatever it is their next game, I'm very confident they can keep the same level of quality shown here.

There's a recent Game Maker's Toolkit video on it, a very interesting one detailing the creation of different gameplay styles for the extra characters: