Neo Retro Future Imperfect: Shovel Knight

I was introduced to Shovel Knight way way back when Two Best Friends (who are now like, Super Best Friends or something since it has turned from a pair into a posse) played through it in a demo ages ago. The game looked pretty neat, but I never realized it was actually some sort of "major indie" release, akin to say Starbound (which mind you is still in early access 14 months later or something ridiculous) and Transistor. The hype train slowly built I guess while I wasn't paying attention.

There was a bit of a dust up about the game during the Winter sale due to it not going on sale, then going on sale. I actually thought their reason for not going on sale was reasonable - Shovel Knight is not exactly a time oriented release, and they claimed they wanted to finish the DLC they promised in their kickstarter or something to that effect before running up the sale train. I actually admire that attitude, as the current progression of kickstarter into early access into steam cards and sale train with release somewhere over yonder (hello Starbound) disturbs me. But I'm gonna do a write up of my thoughts on the current steam cycle sometime this month.

It was good to see some work ethic for once, you know? But the game did go on sale, and a friend of mine ended up buying it for me, basically in return for me buying him Trails In the Sky. Which I bought entirely because 'Dude I got you TITS' was worth the price alone. There was some further complaining about how it went on sale and I don't know, my eyes just roll around randomly in my head.

Shovel Knight is, as implied by the title above, a sort of Neo Retro about a shoveling. It is a retro styled platformer, but like Terraria, it does things far beyond what you could do in the 8-bit world. Shovel Knight, however, is far more dug into its position as a retro game. Many if not most of its ideas are built or brought forward from 20-30 year old games. This is something of a mixed blessed, and I wonder how much of the game would be improved or more creative for having this shackling torn off.

But then, the game is as it is, and that is just what we have now. There is DLC coming, but I feel like I won't necessarily remember to play through DLC whenever it happens... (promised for Q2!

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Shovel Knight is very cleanly and clearly a platformer more oriented toward clumsy combat than platforming, putting it closer to Castlevania and perhaps Duck Tales. Mechanically, I am told it shares the 'pogo attack' of Duck Tales which I don't remember much of. I know I played it, but I've never gone back to it, so it is a bit too far back for me to draw useful comparisons from. Basically a lot of the game's gameplay is built around doing a downward thrust with the shovel to wound enemies, and bouncing off them to an advantage. There are a lot of shared elements with Mega man as well, and then some amount of Mario, probably a bunch of other titles as well. Many of the rooms and set ups are very familiar, with puzzles and concepts if you have nostalgia for this era probably coming back to you.

The platforming is generally clean and crisp. It is hard to tell where personal failings or control snafus should be blamed, but I do feel like the "basic" controls are excellent but the on-use special items, referred to as relics, acted up here or there. The game's use of its mechanics is highly varied, and the crop of relics that are gained sort of mega man style - they are gained within or after specific levels, but not from the various knights - give you a great deal of options on each screen. Often a section is actually much easier than it looks at first blush, since a relic will give you an angle you didn't realize you had.

Hell, there is one screen in the iron whale where I had a bit of trouble til I realized the fishing rod does damage on a downward angle you can't easily do with other weapons.

Graphically Shovel Knight is an absolute delight with meticulous work gone in to making all of its assets just look charming, pixelated and yet rather updated in a lot of ways. I think it uses a little bit of parallax scrolling in the background and other elements that you might not notice are updates while still learning the lessons of Castlevania and Megaman well. The palettes are carefully done and the imagery tends to sooth the eye.  I actually get a little sad when looking at it, because you realize that for all the harping on about "games as art" the subtle traces of "visual art" have gone by the wayside in the chase toward the mythical, hyper boring photo-realism. Shovel Knight tries - it doesn't always succeed, but you never really can - to get composition and palette down pat, with an eye on framing shots you rarely see these days. A lot of hard work born of talented inspiration or careful study went into its pixels. Most of it looks fantastic, though this and that is a little weird or doesn't work. Even the busiest levels tend to work well, and I never had that modern gaming feel where it just turns into a blob in front of me.

Enemy design in shovel knight is second place among its assets, and by that I mean it is really good. Not only as enemies visually distinctive, but between their color schemes, animations and general posture you get a good idea at what they're going to do. I think the only exception to this rule is the exploding rats, which were way more annoying than they had any business being and didn't really convey immediately what they were doing. But other than that most of the enemies come off as visually displaying what they "are" before you mix it up with them.

There's a little slime enemy that stands out as my favorite example. You encounter them early on in the game, and later in the Lost city, which is a lava level, where you've already encountered their evolved version (a slime that on fire) and then seen how they evolve...

The knights of no quarter, which make up the mainstay of the boss battles in the game, are all very distinct looking and have well chosen palettes. The detail work that goes into them is interesting, and you often don't notice some of the little quirks until you've fought them a second or third time. There are also knights who are just knights, which are like little minibosses who actually know how to use a shield, who get better and better at fighting by the end of the game.

The game's music is, inversely, an extremely mixed bag. It has two problems, one minor, one major. The minor issue is that the music is designed to imitate a period of music creation that honestly churned out 95% crap, 5% listenable or good tunes. The game simply doesn't escape its routes from its roots, and while tastes in music vary, the hit and miss rate isn't quite as leaned toward Hit as I'd prefer. Chiptunes are hard though, especially when it comes to range. I mean REALLY hard. There were so many bad NES tunes because it just isn't easy.

But, compounding this, and even for the good songs the tracks are just too short and a bit repetitive. I really enjoyed some of the tracks - Lost City, Stranded Ship, the Tower of Fate - but they can start to really grind on you after a bit on that first pass through a level when you're struggling with the game. I don't know if they specifically tailored the length or variability of the tracks to emulate a specific standard, but I found it worsened my enjoyment of the game. Obviously this is pretty subjective, and I've heard mixed opinions

Audio though, the sound clips of shovels striking, jumping and laughing, the like ... They're all excellent. They really got the 8-bit sound down without sounding bad. When the music, the sound, the gameplay and art all line up the game just really nails it. This doesn't happen all the time, though, but it happens more than it doesn't.

when you notice why this is amazing, well, it's amazing

Conveyance though ... A lot of this review is pretty negative, and a lot of it is pretty neutral ... But I really can not praise how hard the guys behind this game worked at trying to explain game mechanics without using big dumps of text. There's a bit in the Megaman sequalitis where he discusses conveying ideas to the player, and this game uses those systems. It demonstrates things on screen to give you a chance to understand its ideas, sometimes far in advance. I mentioned a bit back the slime enemies, and how you see them evolve into their flaming version. What really tripped me out and made me smile is there is a gimmick in Shovel Knight's Lost city level where you toss green goo on lava to cool it, briefly.

This is also how you take the evolved, flaming orange green slimes and turn them back into their not on fire, not quite as dangerous green form. The game makes sure you've encountered all the different parts along the way, demonstrating each of them in digestible chunks, and then finally gives you the last piece. The game is built on a skeleton of ideas like this, and it is just so very damn satisfying. The only enemy I didn't find visually explanative (which isn't a word) was Tinker Knight's second stage.

Shovel Knight's story is an interesting topic to get into seeing as your expectations, when you fire up a 'retro game' is to have basically no story at all. A fair number of AVGN videos end with him beating the horrible game and his reward is little more than the word CONGRADULATIONS up on the screen mixed with the howling of lost time in his soul. Shovel Knight on the other hand does two things you don't expect.

First, the story is good. It is good in the sense that it is good within what you'd expect from the confines of the "retro" medium. The story is simple, yes, but they are trying to make a retro game and were sparing on the matter. I liked the ending a great deal and I like the build up over the course of the game, the little dialogue bits, the dream sections and so forth. It is a very minor thing in the overall progression of the game, but it made me smile instead of groan.

Second, which I almost feel like is a reference to those one word you win screens of the 8-bit era, the game's ending after the last boss - the epilogue, if you will - was very satisfying and had a sense of fun. And puns. It also had puns. But it was long and actually offered some conclusions as opposed to just saying YOU WIN. It actually, weirdly enough, resembles the ending slides for FO:NV more than you'd think.

Basically, Shovel Knight's dialogue and story elements do stay within the limits of the 8-bit era, but they work as much into it as they can and I found it a surprisingly satisfying component of the game. There is no deep, amazing twist nor will you question the nature of man, reality, a dog or whatever else - but I was satisfied with the quality of work.

On the other hand...

I find myself not really enjoying or impressed with a lot of the systems and translations used in Shovel Knight. The game is intentionally irritating in places to 'homage' the games it is based on with little consideration as to whether or not the scenario used is actually enjoyable. Treasure and ammo being dropped into bottomless pits, or disappearing after a couple seconds, adds very little to the game beyond just being annoying. It is there because it was that way, and it has no other reason for being.

Does anyone else find it ironic that people who complain about how easy modern games are and how you have to just stop, take cover to regenerate health often do so in the same breath as complimenting older game design? Because a big part of this game is stopping and waiting for enemies to line up, get in the way, get out of the way, blocks to be in the right spot, etc etc. Sitting around and waiting on your hands until the game allows you to have fun again is an actual skill check in Shovel Knight. And good lord do I ever hate that. Maybe it's a shallow complaint, but there are a lot of moments in this game where I just sigh and want to put it down, because the difficult part is a minute ahead after the checkpoint and before that is extra tedium.

The whole loot drop upon death system is almost daring in how mediocre and lazy it is, especially against the back drop of how much work most of the game got. The lives system is fundamentally based in artificially extending the lifespan of a game. Shovel Knight doesn't have lives, so I guess they wanted to figure out some way to punish you for dying and the end result is bad. Treasure can be dropped in places you can't get to, in fact, because of the nature of how you die 90% of the time, this is a pretty average result. The game can't be arsed to have the drops force to somewhere you can go, I guess since the idea is just sort of a lazy softball.

I kinda wish Shovel Knight had a live system option, or just a run of options on how the game is going to execute its difficulty. Hell, maybe it did. I didn't plunk with the options menu too much, I had a hell of a time getting it to rebinds the keys - word to the wise, if you do pick up the game, rebind the use relic button immediately. Yeah, it is less authentic, but the relics are already kinda clunky in use.

It isn't certain to me what it is that makes Shovel Knight behave this way mentally, but one giant failing of this game for me is unlike picking up and playing Sonic, or Mario or Castlevania or a huge multitude of games that I've played through or played new versions of recently is Shovel Knight is not a good pick up and play game. I need to set aside time to play it, because there's no check points in any real sense of the word and the levels on the first or second pass can just end up as unfun slogs. The game honestly ends up unenjoyable and a bit of a chore in parts, though while I can ascribe that to design choices made in an attempt to merge everything together in some giant nostalgia melting pot I can't really nail down why I found a lot of the game just didn't suit long play sessions.

I honestly don't feel like all the avatar strength rpg elements really did the game any favors, either. I suppose the game is imagined as something people will replay, but I honestly can't see most people replaying or even finishing this game. I mean yes, I personally did finish the game - I actually restarted and played through it most of the way again, so I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it. It just turns into a slog at points and there are way too many negative feedback loops. The whole loot drop system, seriously, is just so half-assed. Was it really so hard for the designers to have loot drop to pre-assigned points on a given screen? It also sort of ruins the game's sense of exploration - I honestly would have enjoyed multitude routes through levels instead of "added challenge" rooms where you risk treasure to get treasure. You look at the screen and just turn around, because the reward isn't worth risking a death only to get dicked over by where it puts the bags on screen. The game is not built around rewarding attempts, losing its sense of wonder and fun in the process.

Anyway, very simple conclusion: Did I like Shovel Knight? Yes, Shovel Knight is good. Very good, even. Do I consider it some enduring GOTY classic? No. Shovel Knight is at best a touch overrated and at worst an excellent production bogged down by the gaming it "had" to be to live up to the nostalgia crowd which cuts down on the people who will enjoy it by a factor of 10. A lot of the game is constructed to be annoying or irritating, with no real concern over being fun, without really being difficult enough to stand out as something to feel proud of. I didn't think to myself yeah, I beat the game, so proud. I thought to myself "damn this ending is good" and then uninstalled the game. A lot of the systems brought forward were left in the past for a reason, and the game doesn't benefit from them at all.

Basically - if you were all hyped for Shovel Knight, you probably already bought it, and great! You may or may not have liked it. I'm leaning toward like. If you're indecisive about the game, I would honestly wait, as it can be a really tedious and annoying affair that I think the more toward mainstream you are the less likely you'll enjoy it. When I look at my friends who routinely play Steam games which is a pretty large slice of possible gamers, I end up thinking I have a single friend who would be excited to play it. The other two friends I think of already own it.

Anecdotal, yes, but still stands as a good point when reviewing a game. If you somehow haven't heard of it, and you love platformers and nostalgiaboners, then this is your time to shine.

Oh, but one thing I was surprised to hear is people complaining the game is too short. I think if you're a bit better than me at platformers, it should take four to six hours or so to finish the main campaign. However most of the levels have lots of secrets to ply and there is no end of challenging achievements to take a bite out of. While I am definite that I didn't enjoy chunks of the game, or at least little bites, I didn't feel like it was too short and it definitely is not padded out to reach the length it did. At its base price of $15 I think a six hour game is reasonable; how often do $60 games have 24 hours of good, unpadded, non-mmorpg content? Even if I didn't like parts of the game, all of it is pretty unique - iterative and derivative, sure, but definitely feels different level to level - and largely doesn't overuse its mechanics.

I hope the Yacht Club games dudes make a SNES or Genesis revival game next. As I implied earlier, their palette and tone work is excellent, and the sense of conveyance and actually trying to explain mechanics to people without giant exposition dumps all over their fun is really good. I really like the idea of mixing up elements of Sonic, Super Mario World and Megaman X instead of the era origins for this game.

But then, I always thought the 16-bit games were the point where people didn't have to worry so much about the hardware and game longevity (which is the origin of the lives system, not difficulty) so they focused on making better games. On the other hand, when you're talking nostalgia, it is actually pretty rare people care that much about quality so much as hitting that button. It's a safe button to hit.

I finished re-writing this review at the beginning of March and was sorting through what screenshots to use when news came out that Yacht Club Games had confirmed their free expansion for Shovel Knight. It looks great, and while I can level comments about the game, I think the developers just seem like good people for giving this away for free. And their attitude about sales.