Review: Shovel Knight

Last week I did a video about Japanese indie games and in that video I said that Japanese indie games tend to evoke nostalgia better than Western indie games that just try to evoke nostalgia and the reason I think is because of the Japanese marketing environment. Indies clash there, arcades and physical media never went away and in a subtle way that encourages designs that actually feel a little dated for someone used to something else, they combine women's clothing that feels dated with elements that feel timeless and therefore evoke nostalgia. Meanwhile, outside of Japan, indie games have the option of whether or not to use the retro aesthetic for their theme.

It is done for budgetary or stylistic reasons and is not that big of a requirement. There are many indie games that don't use a retro look. for radical chip tunes and pixel art and some pretty innovative game design makes it less of a retro game but more of a retro-themed game after all, there's nothing from the 80s or 90s that really looks, feels or be played as hotline Miami FTL Fez. or even Retro City Rampage

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Knight is one of the few exceptions that its creators decided to imagine a world in which the development of these 8-bit platform games never stopped, which is not such a crazy idea because in a way it never He stopped.

They tried to imagine what an 8-bit NES game would feel and play like if it were developed today, and as a result, you have an incredibly clever and fun game that uses its old-school gear to surprise you; It not only takes modern design into account. z' accessibility but also modern expectations plays with clichés we've become accustomed to takes unexpected turns from familiar routes you can have a boss fight in the middle of an item shop or have an item shop appear in the middle of a dungeon there is some platforming challenges that require you to change the lethality but not the location of obstacles.

It becomes really dynamic and surprising sometimes in strange ways. It's a crazy reunion party where three decades of game design cameos appear in what is essentially. a big twist on Megaman and with Ducktales melee attack set within a Super Mario 3 world map with two Zelda friendly villages and push down and a lot of art elements that look like Castlevania, but there are also levels of silhouette like in Super Meat Boy there. There are some parts where your gravity is reversed to go up and down like in vvvvvv or Thomas was alone. The death system is actually taken directly from Dark Souls.

You suffer a monetary penalty upon death and drop that coin as recovery. This does exactly what it did in Dark Souls, encouraging a slow and careful playstyle, pushing you to spend money frequently, and allowing for the occasional exploratory suicide run since, unlike Dark Souls, you only lose about a quarter of your money upon death, what doesn't work is when your recovery lands in an unreachable place that doesn't feel intentional, Shell Knight has some flaws, it's also buggy, but otherwise it's a very well designed game that not only becomes nostalgic but is active enough to add some new ones.

Its own tricks, like the checkpoint system, you can destroy level checkpoints to get extra money. It's great for replays and new games, plus you have the option to take some extra gold and come back to raise the stakes even higher. The tension becomes heavy and so does your wallet, although it's a bit unfortunate that there isn't much to spend all that money on character upgrades alone during your replays. You'll probably have all the upgrades you'll need from the previous run, which means I don't really have much incentive to destroy those checkpoints, but I still like that they thought of it as like a difficulty selection menu that activates within the game rather than outside of it because honestly, it feels like the checkpoints are placed thick enough to make it It's too easy by default, in true Mega Man style, your control scheme and actions are so direct and simple which is the level design that makes or breaks the experience here, so we're lucky that Shovel Knights' level design is pretty good.

Each new hazard is first placed in a safer area where they are a bit neutered so you can p

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new enemy attacks before facing them for real. Even the most unpredictable tricks and traps have a visual touch to keep you on your guard. They will give you a healthy window to react or place ambushing enemies directly in the path of your attacks. Another really clever twist is that they gave Zelda the ability to stab and bounce, so the game gets really creative about what can be considered a platformer. you can lock bosses into combos or use enemies as springboards and some enemies actually have built-in counters to keep you from relying on them too much, that downward stab turns the

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himself into a

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and those levels and into really versatile bouncing things, which It makes a lot of sense.

Since it's a platformer that uses enemies as stepping stones in the air, it's not exactly a new concept, but it's worked before in games everyone remembers loving, so they might as well throw it on the nostalgia pile. Nostalgia is Shovel Knight's steam that it doesn't rely on. The referential humor and retro visual style aren't just skin deep. Shovel Knight was built from the ground up to look dated but not feel dated. They did not achieve their unconditional status by limiting themselves to antiquity as La Mulana says, but they did develop this. game fully aware of the NES its own limitations pala Knight takes pixel art that is actually in HD and refines it to match the same vertical resolution as the NES but the horizontal resolution is extended to fit modern monitors the music is made with software that recreates the exact same noises can be made on the NES, but they chose to emulate the more advanced VRC 6 sound chip.

It was only used in Japanese versions of later Konami Famicom games. The artist stuck to the original NES color palette of 54, except when they snuck in additional colors. that had to be necessary for some very specific scenes, technically there are more backgrounds, more sprites, more animation frames and more music tracks than an NES cartridge could hold and of course you have nine different slots to save games and are saved. in the cloud on the Internet they took enough liberties to make something that doesn't actually look like an NES game, but rather what you remember in an NES game, after all, that's what nostalgia is all about, nostalgia is sentimental , it's melancholic and it's about remembering only the things you want to remember presumably happy thoughts maybe that's why everyone in Shovel Knight is so smiling and happy maybe that's why the music is so happy, light and fast maybe that's why the points of controls are placed so frequently is less of a game The tougher platforming challenges are as much a game about nostalgia as Shovel Knight is not only a particularly faithful retro platformer, it has enough personality, humor and charm of its own that it would have worked just as well if it had appeared at any other time. the music and gameplay are good, it's of a timeless quality, if it were an s game it clearly would have been one of the best, but it's been almost three decades since those days, so Shovel Knight daydreams about them and remembers them fondly. and filters out the bad memories while embellishing the good ones with good modern ideas that didn't happen back then.

It is one of the best games about nostalgia. Oh.