![]() ![]() The game is bristling with all the features and additives you'd want in a "next-gen 8-bit" title. I pause next to a gap that's sparkling, tap a button while holding Up on the D-pad and cast my line: Did I mention you can fish for power-ups, too? Giant cauldrons suspended in the air fill and tip, fill and tip, spilling something that might be lava, or maybe it's sand-call it deadly either way. Ooze-green turrets that resemble the tips of subterranean drilling machines thrust into a troubled violet sky. I dash across battlements made of rectangles so perfect they seem like polished gems. It's retro yet hyper-real, the perfect realization of some long-ago 8-bit ideal that revels in its exactingly crude 8-bit-ness. There's something uncanny about seeing that happen on a big pixel-perfect screen. Shovel Knight looks like an NES game you've never seen, a time machine back to an alternate history where 8-bit NES games ran on 1920-by-1080 pixel flat-screens and employed advanced post-NES features like multi-scrolling backdrops alongside intricate animations. It's a calculated grab bag of trials and tribulations, a delightful surprise around every corner. It has chorus lines of flying enemies you must bounce off of to bridge chasms, enemies that materialize from nothing and creep toward you like magnetized cottonwood seeds, enemies that morph into bigger enemies and subject you to a multitude of withering attacks. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and why shouldn't it? Here's a nigh-Platonic realization of an 8-bit side-scroller, with platforms that spit fire or crumble at your touch, platforms that elevate endlessly, platforms that rocket across the room and leave you plummeting like Wile E. You've played this sort of game before it's just been a while. You almost inevitably fail, yet you revel in it, even after the dozenth attempt. Playing Shovel Knight, released today on PC, Mac, Linux, Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, is like chopping wood, only here the cords are split-second choices you make every microsecond. Training for a marathon or rolling through Oscar Peterson’s finger-tangling jazz exercises on my piano is kids' stuff compared to mastering this maddening, brilliant, heartless, utterly gorgeous throwback to the platform games of yore. I tell myself, "Just one more try," but who am I kidding? I could do this all night, partly because of how well it controls: Shovel Knight is a game that handles like a brick that handles like a Maserati. I want to call it quits, throw in the towel, chuck the gamepad at the towel. It's taunting me like a carnival barker, like a cheap prize dangling at the end of an arcade claw crane. Yacht Club Games also revealed that its upcoming SNES-style Shovel Knight Dig is in its final stages of development and showed new gameplay from its bug-infested Grub Pit level.Shovel Knight is crushing my ego. Three further DLC packs are also on their way for Pocket Dungeon that will include an online versus mode, new playable characters, relics, and secrets, and mod support on PC. Random Knight will appear after players have already recruited a handful of different knights and will become one at random upon the start of a new adventure. Updates on Shovel Knight's spin-offs were also shared at Yacht Club Games Presents, such as a new character called Random Knight coming to its block-falling puzzle game Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon. PC (via Steam) was the only platform this game has been confirmed for, but Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms were all mentioned as possible destinations for Mina the Hollower. Yacht Club Games didn't mention a release window for Mina the Hollower, but Shovel Knight launched 14 months after its Kickstarter campaign ended, after accruing over $300,000 in one month.
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