Shovel Knight Dig is a roguelike remix of the Shovel Knight platformer series that actually lands the execution of both worlds really well. I’ve seen some stuff online comparing it to Downwell, but really the only thing it has in common with that game is that you’re moving down vertically in the map. The gameplay flow and overall design philosophies couldn’t really be more different. Where Downwell is a snappy, practice-til-you-master-it precision roguelike platformer, Shovel Knight Dig is far more immersive and rewards mastery over the game’s mechanics in a far less punishing kind of way.

But my goal here is not really to compare the two games—it’s mainly to talk about Shovel Knight Dig’s strengths and weaknesses.

As I mentioned, Shovel Knight Dig is not particularly punishing. You’ll definitely die quite a few times, but the progress that you make in the game seems to happen so rapidly that by the end of about four or five hours, you’ll have already beaten the game once. In fact, I was really surprised when I beat the game the first time because it seemed like I was just starting to get the hang of the mechanics.

I think one of the biggest flaws of the game is how broken one of the health items is. It’s something like—it increases your health by 50%, but you can’t see your health containers. Once you grab that item, you just start to get insane momentum, and future health container upgrades are still out there, so you can really get an absurd amount of health and just kind of tank your way to the end of the game.

That sort of blunted my enjoyment a bit because I felt like I was getting better with the mechanics, but by the time I had beaten the game, I wasn’t sure if I had really gotten significantly better or if I just had a ton of heart containers. In fact, I only got up to the final boss twice. I barely lost the first time, and I had a lot of heart containers, and I won the second time—again, with a ton of heart containers. So the tankiness does feel like a cheapening of the game’s difficulty, and that was really my main complaint.

Other than that, the actual gameplay loop is really fun. The most genius thing about it is the mini-puzzles that are procedurally created for each run. Every single screen—and there are lots and lots of them that are randomized in—contains kind of a micro-puzzle where you can decide to get some gems or not, or break a wall to get the secret room or not, and get a cog that contributes to an item at the end of a stage.

I found the actual loop to be a lot of fun. And once again, it’s Shovel Knight, so you know you’re going to be bouncing off enemies, and you are going to be doing some close combat with your shovel. All that is fun. A lot of the same enemies return. The game does seem pretty difficult when you’re very first getting into things, but it eases, as I mentioned, as you go.

Something else great about the game is that there’s a lot of secrets and little fun puzzles that you can do as you progress that are tied, in many cases, to quests. And you have a sort of journal that keeps track of all these little quests and challenges, and I found that pretty fun. I think by the time I had beaten the game, I was like 50% done with all the quests, and I had some significant progress in other areas. I didn’t feel incredibly motivated to do 100% of everything, but maybe one day I’ll go back to it because the game is so fun.

There really is also a lot of variety. In the hub world—many games, like Rogue Legacy for example, use the hub world solely for upgrades—but there’s a lot of flair in Shovel Knight Dig’s hub world, where you can interact with NPCs, which are always sort of changing. Their dialogue is changing, so if you’re into that, you can get a lot of flair text. There are also some minigames built into that hub world.

So there’s a lot of variety, it’s very snappy, and overall, as a fan of Shovel Knight, I definitely found myself satisfied.