Shovel Knight himself is something of a basic bitch he really can only whack enemies with his shovel. When you defeat them, they join your party as alternate playable characters. You’ll encounter a boss every few levels, rival Knights from the villainous Order of No Quarter. Extra lives aren’t without penalty, though each time you die and return within the same level, you’ll lose a bundle of gems and have to go out of your way to get them back. I found that giving myself three lives smoothed out the potential frustration of dying while still presenting a formidable challenge. After several hours of the default experience, I experimented a bit with the settings. The game encourages you to toy with its settings, though, to give yourself as many lives as you’re comfortable with. Every time you play Pocket Dungeon, your arsenal grows a little stronger, and it gets a little more likely that you’ll live to see your adventure to the end.īy default, Pocket Dungeon only lets you die once before starting over. From the moment you buy them, these power-ups will randomly appear in chests in each level. ![]() That doesn’t mean there isn’t meaningful progression though you keep the gems you earn in each run and can spend them on items and relics at the campsite’s shop. This is a rogue-lite game, meaning that if you die, you head back to your campsite and start from the beginning. Pocket Dungeon’s addictiveness is partly a product of its structure. I’d wake up each morning and immediately think of Pocket Dungeon, plotting ways to carve out time for the game throughout the day. In my time with the game I’d often tell myself ‘Just one more level before bed’ and soon find that entire hours had melted away. Levels only take a minute or two to beat, making them a wonderful diversion for when you only have a short time in which to play. Ace of spadesĪll of this makes for a very fun and addictive core gameplay loop. The longer you keep your combo meter up, the more gems you’ll earn this is something that I had to figure out for myself, and that I would have liked the game’s tutorial to be a little clearer on. It’s immensely gratifying to obliterate a swarm of twenty or more Boneclangs at once. By allowing enemies to stack up, you can attack one and harm the rest for huge combos. I felt the urge to try powering through as quickly as possible, and quickly learned to do the opposite patience is often a virtue. Time passes slowly in Pocket Dungeon, and only speeds up when you move. ![]() Fallen enemies drop gems, the game’s currency, and the tinkly sound they make as they enter your purse quickly inspired an almost Pavlovian response from my dopamine centre. This tension results in a rush of satisfaction when things go your way, but is rarely frustrating when they don’t. With only a handful of health points to your name, combat is a delicate dance of whacking your foes and making pit stops for healing potions. ![]() ![]() Some will even leave pools of acid or lava behind, damaging you from beyond the grave. Every time you damage an enemy, they inflict damage on you in turn. His only guide is the eccentric Puzzle Knight, who informs Shovel Knight that he must bash these foes to death with his shovel before they fill the screen in order to escape.īe warned, though: the ghoulies hit back. Our hero finds himself transported to a strange dungeon made up of grid-based levels that slowly fill up with ghosts and ghoulies. Pocket Dungeon, however, takes inspiration from the dormant genre of the falling block puzzle game. Can you dig it?Ģ014’s Shovel Knight played like a forgotten 8-bit NES platformer that never was. What developers Yacht Club Games and Vine have achieved with Pocket Dungeon, though, is nothing short of a Frasier. Such a huge change could easily have resulted in a Joey-esque failure. Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon takes the original game’s spade-wielding protagonist and throws him into a whole new genre: a rogue-lite puzzle adventure. For every Simpsons, there’s a Young Sheldon for every Better Call Saul, a Torchwood. Spin-offs are a tricky thing to get right.
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