Shovel Knight has been something of a marvel in the indie gaming scene. Originally busting onto the scene in 2014, the platformer took the gaming scene by storm with outstanding gameplay, unique characters, and a plethora of updates! There’s even a multiplayer fighting game called Shovel Knight Showdown!
Fortunately for everyone, Yacht Club Games, creators and publishers of Shovel Knight, have shown no signs of slowing down. While we’re all waiting for their upcoming Shovel Knight title, Shovel Knight Dig, which has distinct Mr. Driller undertones, they’ve seen fit to grace us with a unique Shovel Knight-themed puzzle game, Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon. This isn’t entirely a surprise, but no one really knew what to expect from Pocket Dungeon and there wasn’t a lot of buzz surrounding it until it’s release a few days ago. For a game that most people weren’t even expecting, Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon is definitely something special too!
In Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, you play the ubiquitous Shovel Knight, resting in the woods after his long adventure in Shovel Knight Treasure Trove. Suddenly, he spies what appears to be a gift. And like any random knight in the woods who sees a wrapped present by his campfire with no one around, he opens it! Unfortunately for our hero, it’s actually a portal into the Pocket Dungeon puzzle dimension and the Knight is sucked in, trapped until he can fight his way through the puzzle dimension’s devilishly challenging dungeons and get back to his own world! It turns out most of the cast of Shovel Knight has been sucked in too, unable to resist the Pocket gift, and Plague Knight, King Knight, Scrap Knight and more are all present. As you fight through the levels, you’ll eventually unlock the knights as playable characters, similar to the original game, and find a way to escape the Pocket Dungeon dimension!
In Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, you’re placed onto a puzzle grid much like any standard puzzle game. However, gameplay is far from standard here! Instead of matching blocks or twisting shapes, you have no control over the items, blocks, and creatures falling from the top of the screen onto your play area. Rather, you control Shovel Knight, who must defeat the enemies! Each time you hit an enemy, they hit you back, depleting your life. You’ve only got five hit points, so it pays to be careful! Hit an enemy and it damages all the identical enemies touching them, so you have to be strategic in your attacks to clear the most enemies at once! The more you kill simultaneously, the more gems you collect, which can then be spent either in shop dungeons within stages or upon your inevitable defeat back at the camp shop.
Medicine bottles also fall down to heal you when collected, and keys and treasure chests plummet down as well while you fight. Treasure chests contain random weapons and armor, including spears that increase your range and damage, axes that freeze opponents so they can’t fight back, shields that block hits and lots more. Sometimes you can use a key to open a shop, slipping in to spend those hard-earned gems on life-bar extensions, poison attacks, flaming boots and much more. Beat a few levels and it’s time for a boss fight against the other knights! Each has a unique attack style and you must defeat them by knocking down their rather substantial life bars while dealing with the rapidly multiplying puzzle elements of the game at the same time! Beat them and they become playable characters, each with their own special attacks, abilities, and weaknesses that fundamentally shift the core gameplay. Suffice it to say there’s a heck of a lot going on in Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon!
There’s a lot more going on in the ten stages of the game however. As you play, you can go back to the shop and buy more items with each death. These items show up as random unlocks in the treasure chests. On top of that, you’re also on the hunt for four key fragments lost by the Puzzle Knight. While playing, you’ll occasionally manage to access a warp block that takes you to a hidden shrine. Make it there with all four key fragments and things get even more interesting! Even if you can’t pull that off, you’ll still manage to beat the game if you get through all ten stages, but it won’t be easy! Just because you’ve learned how to beat one stage, you’ll still likely be stymied by the next! Each stage has unique monsters and blocks and each new monster has unique attacks and different hit points, so each stage requires careful planning, strategy, and experimentation to succeed! Even though the game is only about a half hour long if all the stars and planets align and you know all the mechanics, it’ll take you a heck of a lot longer than that to actually complete the game, find the key fragments, and finish everything! You can even buy access to a level select with gems as well, allowing you to jump to whatever levels you want to play, but in the end, that won’t help you fully complete the game.
Oh, did you think that was it? There’s more! In addition to the main Adventure mode of the game, there’s also a two player versus mode (you can play against the CPU though) where you can fight a friend in one-on-one puzzling combat! Destroy enemies to drop blocks and swarms of enemies on your opponent until their screen is filled and they suffer a crushing defeat. Naturally, it’s more fun with couch co-op than against the CPU but it’s nice to have options and you can play the different knights and use their abilities too! On top of that there’s also a Daily Run mode, which immediately drops you into a one-time-only dungeon with a random Knight, forcing you to fight your way through for score and glory! The longer you survive, the higher your score and those scores upload to a leaderboard, allowing you to gloat about your prowess to the world if you happen to be good enough!
Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon is a gorgeous game too, taking every ounce of charm from the pixel art of the original game and combining it with new and unique puzzle elements to create an absolutely captivating game. The colors are vibrant, the character designs are excellent, and there’s always something happening in every furious combat! The soundtrack that accompanies that pixel art is exciting and dynamic too, furthering the excitement of each stage and ramping up the stress levels as you play.
It definitely takes a bit to get used to the mechanics in Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon and at first, progress feels slow and incremental. As you develop a knack for the style of the game, you’ll get further and further each try though. Sadly, all your accumulated items and powerups are lost because this isn’t a roguelike, but that would have made the game far too easy anyway. What you’ll find when you start over at the beginning after each death is that every playthrough of Pocket Dungeon is challenging and stressful and even if you manage to blow your way through most or all of the levels one time, it’s more than possible to be defeated before the first boss the next! There’s little forgiveness here if you get sloppy and the challenge is refreshing. This is a game that stays exciting and fun even when replaying levels, and as you refine your techniques to maximize your gem multipliers, the game only becomes more gratifying!
With a healthy dose of gameplay in Adventure Mode, a stack of unlockable characters, unique enemies on every level, and even some hidden challenges, Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon is an absolute blast to play. Toss in the Versus Mode, the Daily Feat, and even the ability to tweak settings to help out those players who are less skilled by adding life and other modifications and you’ve got yourself one heck of a game! Oh, and you can also choose whether you’re defeated upon your first death, which is pretty intensely hardcore, or when the screen fills entirely with blocks and monsters, crushing the life out of your Knight. Neat, right? At a measly $20, you’re getting a lot of awesome gameplay for your cash, plus tons of Shovel Knight charm. Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon is easily one of the most unique puzzle games to be released in recent memory! Far from creating a tacked-on money grab capitalizing on popular characters, Yacht Club has really gone the extra mile and created something new and special here for fans and newbies alike. Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon is well worth your time, it’s awesome to play, and quite frankly, it’s one of the best puzzle games out there!
This review was based on a digital copy of Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon provided by the publisher. It was played on a Playstation 4 Pro with a Sony 55” 1080p TV. Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon is also available for Switch and PC on Steam.