![]() ![]() Treasure Knight inflicts more damage on enemies from below, so you’re encouraged to hang out more near the bottom of the board. Mole Knight can burrow around the map, swapping locations quickly and giving you much more mobility. For a lot of my initial runs, I mained Shovel Knight, but after reaching the credits for the first time, I started experimenting more with other characters and realized how ridiculously you can bend the rules of the game.įor example, Specter Knight earns two hit points every time he slays an enemy, but potions do damage to him, so you often play keepaway from potions while trying to time your combos more deliberately to regain health. All of them control the same, but they each have their own unique abilities that can completely alter your strategies. You begin with the title character, but as you beat bosses and uncover other secrets, you can unlock more than 10 other playable characters, including Shield Knight and familiar foes from the Order of No Quarter. If you want to get wild, you can even make it so the order of the stages is randomized, which can sometimes get diabolical as starting with the later stages is a bear.Īll of this is already fulfilling before you get to the fact that Pocket Dungeon has many more playable characters than just Shovel Knight. The variety in runs is vast, especially since you can earn gems every run to purchase more Relics for the future. Keys can be found frequently, which in turn unlock treasure chests on the puzzle board so you can trigger screen-clearing bombs or powerful limited-use items that increase your offense or defense. It’s extremely flexible even if it’s potentially harsh when you first boot it up.Įven on a run-by-run basis, you can boost your abilities with Relics that give your hero more hit points or different abilities or buffs. You can tweak how many lives you have, change how many hit points you start with, and also the damage enemies do to you. Each style is challenging, but that isn’t where the difficulty customization ends. By default, you go through a set of levels similar to the basic narrative of the original Shovel Knight and can pick at the outset to play it in roguelike style, where one death kicks you back to the beginning, or puzzle style, where you can die as many times as you like but will have to restart if the puzzle board fills up. The overall structure is a run-based design evocative of roguelikes. Bosses still all take place on a grid, but they have unique mechanics and patterns and usually some kind of larger set piece. ![]() The going gets tough very quickly, as new enemies are introduced every level and boss battles show up throughout the game. Losing all your hearts results in dropping some of your gems, much like when you die in Shovel Knight proper. Thankfully, the grid also has potions strewn about, and running into them can restore the health you lose from combat. By default, Shovel Knight does one damage to the group of enemies he runs into, and typically, most enemies do one damage in return. It takes some getting used to because when you run into an enemy, you do damage to each other. The twist is that the blocks are, for the most part, all enemies instead of moving them around as Toad in Wario’s Woods, you fight them as characters from Shovel Knight. You control a character on a falling-block puzzle grid and move around to try to chain together blocks of the same type to avoid the stage from filling up. The basic gameplay reminds me a ton of the ‘90s Nintendo puzzler Wario’s Woods. ![]() Yacht Club Games and Vine basically came together to make a puzzle game as expansive as the platformer it’s spun off from, and the results are magnificent. That’s why I was blown away by how deep and intricate Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon is. Whenever there is some expansive puzzle game, usually Tetris has to be involved to make it happen. That’s not to knock the quality of the genre, but oftentimes they skew towards being free-to-play mobile titles or no-frills and no-nonsense console affairs. ![]() Puzzle games have, for better or worse, settled into being assumed to be lower-tier, cheaper games. ![]()
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