Shovel Knight Dig (2022)

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.

While Shovel Knight is pretty DTF with any indie game, his two previous games that had his name in the title were spectacular. They are games I recommend without caveats- or the only caveat is budget dependent. Don't have the money for Pocket Dungeon? Well then I DON'T recommend you rob a bank to get the necessary funds!

Wink

Shovel Knight Dig is a Shovel Knight game separate from the many indie games our blue boy has popped up in like Super Smash Bros Ultimate. At least in my eyes, this has a more substantial impact on Shovel Knight's legacy than Rivals of Aether and Blade Strangers. Will it push Shovel Knight closer to Mario status or is Shovel Knight turning into Spyro*?

There is plenty to enjoy in Shovel Knight Dig. Nitrome has always been stylish, but I don't recall any of their games ever looking this good. Heck, this is the best the Shovel man himself has ever looked. Also, composer Jake Kaufman is back with banger after banger. It genuinely bothered me that some of my time playing this game was on a train without proper corded headphones to enjoy the irresistible tunes. The gameplay itself is chunky and nice in the way the original was... But it is also thin like Bilbo Baggins. "Like butter that has been scraped over too much bread."

Dig is a Roguelike, a genre of video game of which I am a fan. And it includes a lot of the hallmarks of the genre, most critically upgrades that disappear after the end of a run. The problem is I don't think there are nearly enough upgrades and many of the upgrades that are in the game do not meaningfully change your play style. Instead of improvising when you get a useful but unexpected upgrade, I found myself frustrated and ready to kill the blue guy so I could restart the run with an actually helpful upgrade.

Finally, Shovel Knight has a specific vibe. The original (and all of its generous campaigns) strike this wonderful balance between sincere and goofy. It's also in parts very funny. Shovel Knight Dig kinda just misses this. It feels more like the writing in a MegaMan game than the writing for Shovel Knight. Shovel and Shield Knight's love feels platonic. The enemies neither feel threatening nor silly. They're just little greed monsters. And I never laughed. King of Cards, the best Shovel Knight campaign, has several lines that made me giggle, a handful of lines that made my chortle, and the funniest joke in any video game I've ever played. However in Dig, the charms are only aesthetic.

So it definitely is not my favorite Shovel Knight game and it is definitely not my favorite Roguelike. That being said, I had fun. I never got frustrated and never considered putting the game on the back burner. But it is markedly not as great as Pocket Dungeon, Shovel of Hope, Plague of Shadows, Spectre of Torment, or King of Cards. It's a step down for the franchise, one that I hope is corrected in its next inevitable entry.

Oh and breaking news! The next game in the series is gunna be... Shovel Knight Teaches Typing?

Wow, he really is bound to be like Mario after all!

*My grandmother bought me a Spyro game for the Gameboy Advance for some Christmas that I could figure out, but the game was so despised by me, I do not care to investigate the year or even the name of the game. Spyro can literally eat my poo forever.