Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove (Nintendo Switch) Review

At a time when studios are cranking out retro-inspired games left and right, and sometimes seemingly with little to no effort, Shovel Knight digs its way out of the pile and rises to the top, setting itself apart in a field oversaturated with similar titles. From the beautiful pixel-based art design to the NES-style fonts and music, it's clear that the retro theme here isn't some cheap attempt to score points off of nostalgia, but an actual fibre of the game's being.

Yacht Club Games clearly poured effort into the sprites, the controls, the sound bits, and the gameplay, and the resulting game feels right out of the NES era, but in a way different from other games designed to look or feel the same way. Shovel Knight exists to be an 8-bit adventure, to the extent that it's hard to imagine the game working any other way.

Players control the titular Shovel Knight, and giving him a shovel over a sword was a stroke of genius. Besides standing apart from the generic knight adventure, the game features digging-based mechanics like tunnelling through dirt to find secret passages, unburying loot from mounds of dirt, and deflecting enemies' projectiles back at them.

This is a title that has always existed to be ideal at home or on the go, making the Nintendo Switch the perfect platform for it, and seeing it debut on Nintendo's home console brings the friendly history of Nintendo and Shovel Knight full circle.