LogFAQs > #932576101

#43





Years of release: 2014 (PC/3DS/Wii U), 2015 (PS3/PS4/XB1/Vita/...Amazon Fire TV? Huh???), 2017 (Switch). I don't have years on the DLC, too lazy
Beaten?: Yes

God, I'm old.

I mean, yeah, okay, I'm 31, I'm still young, kvetching about my age can wait another ten years or so. But these damn kids are out here all over my lawn with their Minecrafts and Fortnites and what have you. I don't understand these things! I mean, I probably would understand these things if I wasn't a stubborn old man and I tried to play and understand them properly. The truth is though that not understand the big new things that kids are into have been a thing for me for even longer than this. I am a proud child of the 90's. I was 6 when Donkey Kong Country came out and became a huge cultural phenomenon, and nowadays that's as bog-standard a 2D platformer as you can find. That's the tradition I was born and raised in, and the move towards big cinematic FPS experiences has never caught on with me.

Shovel Knight makes this list almost more out of appreciation for what it is than anything else - a solid game in its own right, but also a pitch-perfect retro pastiche. What I like so much about it is that it's not merely the sort of faux retro thing that either leans too hard on nostalgia or just lazily uses a pixel art style without being able to accurately capture the era of gamign it's trying to ape. It feels like an accurately captured snapshot of an alternate future, one in which we never got the Playstation or the N64 and we kept making games that looked like NES games and had NES game sensibilities forever while still evolving what it *meant* to look like an NES game and feel like an NES game. It's not quite an NES-styled game; it uses too many colors and particle effects and it makes a few design choices an NES game might not, but it still manages to capture the "aesthetic" while carving out an artistic niche of its own.

The game is not through and through spectacular, but it's solid enough. If you're going to borrow a mechanic from old NES games, the pogo-sticking from Zelda II/DuckTales is most definitely one of the best you could have borrowed - downstabbing stuff never gets old, and it helps with the fact that Shovel Knight's default attack is otherwise a little underwhelming, as are most of his special movies. It's otherwise a well-executed platformer with strong boss fights, really lovely NES visuals, and an excellent soundtrack. It isn't the first time I've sung Jake 'virt' Kaufman's praises, but I think he composed this soundtrack entirely in Famitracker, and the man is basically a wizard - some of this stuff is more complicated than anything I've ever heard made with the NES's sound chip, lots of thick textures and weird progressions. All of this adds up to one of the most memorable retro pastiches of the decade.

I have only played the original and the Plague Knight campaigns - I haven't played the more recent ones. The Plague Knight campaign was ok, and I was surprised that they added some interesting story stuff to it, but it wasn't enough to really keep me coming back. But I've heard good things about the more recent content updates, so I should probably pick them up again sometime.