If there’s one thing I love above all else in gaming, it’s old-school games. You know, the NES and SNES games a lot of us grew up playing and falling in love with. Sure, new games are all fine and good, but there’s something truly special about what the days of gaming yore provided for us.
And that’s where Shovel Knight comes in.
Shovel Knight comes from a studio you’ve almost certainly never heard of: Yacht Club Games. But the studio is made up of veterans of a studio you’ve most certainly heard of, one with exceptional credibility with the old-school gamers out there: WayForward. And it’s with that news that I reveal to you Shovel Knight, along with the game’s Kickstarter.
I got to speak to Sean Velasco of Yacht Club Games about his team’s project, which, as he readily admits, takes heavy influence from the likes of the Mega Man NES games, Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse and Super Mario Bros. 3. The game delivers a “pumped-up 8-bit aesthetic,” he told me, using a color palette in-line with the well-known limitations of the NES, but with cool little extras, like parallax scrolling and better animation. Velasco called it an “evolved” art design very much rooted in the past.
The game revolves around the title character as he does battle with The Order of No Quarter, a group of eight devilish knights led by an enemy known only as The Enchantress. Each world is built specifically around each knight, just like a Mega Man game’s Robot Master has a stage that coincidentally has a lot to do with his special skill.
Shovel Knight totes so-called “gated progression,” meaning that you have to beat certain stages to unlock new stages, and so on and so forth. In this regard, think Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World. Indeed, the game’s world map is clearly influenced by those seminal games. And the Shovel Knight himself, in his glistening blue armor, has a limited array of attacks and moves, just like an NES-era character would. He can jump, swing his shovel as a weapon, and dig into the ground, ala Super Mario Bros. 2. He can even jump up and thrust down with his shovel; think Zelda II or Duck Tales.
For now, Yacht Club Games has decided to bring Shovel Knight to PC first, though it will almost certainly migrate to Nintendo platforms soon thereafter. “Our Nintendo love is definitely strong,” Velasco told me. It’s also possible that the game comes out elsewhere thereafter.
Interested in Shovel Knight? Check out its Kickstarter, which is asking for $75,000 in funding. And keep it tuned to IGN in the coming weeks and months for more Shovel Knight reveals, culminating in our full review.
Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.
Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com
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