Shovel Knight Review - Digging For Trouble

[Slegiar Dryke]

I'd say that's a small price to pay for not having to deal with an arbitrary life system.

A game is always going to have some penalty for dying.

Sorry but with that kind of an attitude to a problem that has plagued video-games since their inception it will never go away.

There is simply no good reason to penalize the player for making a mistake. The natural course of cause and effect is enough, we don't need people adding on extra little fuck-yous to the player on top of those. It's just annoying, and yet they keep doing it. It's fucking bullshit.

so basically you want every game to be kirby's epic yarn, where you could never die, because its "annoying". yet you claim the "natural course of cause and effect" is enough. news flash. Cause: You goofed up and died. oops. Effect: you lost *life, items, gold, experience, thing*, better do something different so that doesn't happen again.

if it was "oops, you died, pat on the head, here you go on your way" it removes the challenge. games are SUPPOSED to challenge and make us think and weigh the risks and rewards. those little "Fuck-you's" are needed, and this games one is pretty nice compared to some.

 

[Frozengale]

You just don't get it. There is a difference between; oh shit I fucked up and died, I lost everything I earned since my last save, now I need to reload my saved game and start over from there. And, oh shit I fucked up and died, now I'm placed back at an earlier save point but the bastards also took something from me.

It would be fine if you lost everything you got since your last save point, as long as the level itself reverts back to the way it was as well so that you at least have the opportunity to get it all back. But platformers don't always work in this straightforward manner and feel the need to add on unwanted bullshit, like using live systems or taking away money or points or power-ups.

Wait... what... so your problem with the game is that there is a chance to lose a very small amount of gold if you screw up a few times. You would rather have to do the entire level over, instead of losing 1 minute of progress and a chance to get back the 30% of your gold you just lost. Most people don't like huge time sinks like that. And hey if you want, the game literally saves at the beginning of each level, so if you die you can do a soft reset on the game, and start over from the beginning and spend 10 - 15 minutes doing the exact same thing that you just did. I would feel sorry for you when it came to the boss fights though, I mean you COULD easily get your money back after dying to a boss by going into the room again and spending the first 2 seconds of the boss battle recollecting your gold. I mean you may get hit once and lose 1 HP of the 10-20 that you have, but I guess it would be more fun to get to the boss battle, die while trying to learn how to fight them, and have to go through the entire level all over again.

I really don't see how small and menial punishment mechanics are "holding games back". Especially since your alternative is an even greater punishment mechanic.

 

[Slegiar Dryke]

You are still not getting it. It's the difference between the way something fundamentally works (cause and effect) and arbitrary punishment by developers.

Honestly it sounds like you're the one not getting it. Actions in life (causes) have consequences (effects). you claim there's a problem with what is one of the base principles of games from their beginning, that of, by the cause of making a wrong move, you earn the effect of having try again at the cost of something. all the way back to pong, if you didn't move, the ball would score a goal. its not "arbitrary punishment" pushed by developers nowadays, its something that's been around for all of gaming history, following exactly the formula of cause and effect. if you still are going to say its bull and unfair stuff pushed by developers, despite all the reasons such effects are good things to make a game more fun or challenging based on how they're implemented.........well, like I said before....your standards sound a little bit screwballed...

Frozengale's right, the alternative could be things being even harder. would you prefer it like the really old games then, where if you die, you start at the very beginning of the game?

 

[Frozengale]

Wait... what... so your problem with the game is that there is a chance to lose a very small amount of gold if you screw up a few times. You would rather have to do the entire level over, instead of losing 1 minute of progress and a chance to get back the 30% of your gold you just lost. Most people don't like huge time sinks like that. And hey if you want, the game literally saves at the beginning of each level, so if you die you can do a soft reset on the game, and start over from the beginning and spend 10 - 15 minutes doing the exact same thing that you just did. I would feel sorry for you when it came to the boss fights though, I mean you COULD easily get your money back after dying to a boss by going into the room again and spending the first 2 seconds of the boss battle recollecting your gold. I mean you may get hit once and lose 1 HP of the 10-20 that you have, but I guess it would be more fun to get to the boss battle, die while trying to learn how to fight them, and have to go through the entire level all over again.

I really don't see how small and menial punishment mechanics are "holding games back". Especially since your alternative is an even greater punishment mechanic.

You are still not getting it. It's the difference between the way something fundamentally works (cause and effect) and arbitrary punishment by developers.

"Arbitrary Punishment" is the "Effect" in the cause and effect loop that is gaming. It is was what brings difficultly and weight to a game. All games revolve around some form of positive and negative feedback. Positive feedback is usually in the form of new items, high scores, more gameplay, etc. Negative feedback can range from the very mild (Kirby's Epic Yarn) to the very harsh (Permadeath). There is no "right" or "wrong" way to implement negative feedback, there is just different ways to do it. And it can't really be "Arbitrary Punishment" because everything about a game is arbitrary. But if you want to have a game that involves challenge then you have to have some form of Negative Feedback. Without negative feedback there is no consequence to your decisions. Failure not being an option just means that you are basically watching a very tedious movie with minimal input. If Mario can not die, then what is the point of playing? There is no skill involved in beating the game since beating the game is nothing more then a product of putting in the minimum amount of time to move Mario from one side of the screen to the next. For a game to have Challenge and require Skill there must be negative feedback. Even what you described in your previous post was negative feedback, just of a different variety, and just as arbitrary as Shovel Knight's Negative Feedback. If you don't like Shovel Knight's punishment system then that is fine, but don't go saying that they are somehow ruining gaming because they have a punishment system that incorporates more modern forms of negative feedback (losing "currency" with a chance to reclaim it, as popularized by From Software).

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

I finished the game and ran through new game + aka hard mode. I really liked the final levels, evil rats and all.

I have only one feat left to achieve. The <1h30m speedrun, and its probably going to be a pain as I need to cut out a lot of time.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

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I think what Valderis is getting at, is that they'd prefer, say, a Super Meat Boy style mechanic where you die and then respawn at the last checkpoint, but that's your *only* punishment. Your items, EXP, etc would be exactly the same as when you first passed that checkpoint. All you lose is a little bit of progress.

Am I on the money at all?

 

[Daniel Janhagen]

Eh, I'd say the comparisons to Medusa Heads are rather poor, not in that it's not a style of difficulty found in Shovel Knight but in that the Medusa Heads really aren't that bad. Yes they can be annoying and are often placed in a such a way that they cause you difficulties, but they also have an extremely predictable movement pattern and always appear in the same place at the same time. Quite frankly, if specifically placed challenges that test my knowledge of the game in a fair and predictable way, just as the Medusa Heads do, is something that I can expect in Shovel Knight then I'm afraid I can't see that as a negative.

Pretty much exactly what I was going to say, but I am way late! Many people don't seem to realize that they move in a perfectly predictable sine wave pattern and are thus only a danger to people who don't pay attention.
I also sometimes want a game that I can sleep play through and never have to pay attention, maybe even chat as I play (I played World of Warcraft for years and loved it!), but it would be bad if every game was like that.
In other words: Yeah, bring on the medusa heads!

 

[Slegiar Dryke]

I think what Valderis is getting at, is that they'd prefer, say, a Super Meat Boy style mechanic where you die and then respawn at the last checkpoint, but that's your *only* punishment. Your items, EXP, etc would be exactly the same as when you first passed that checkpoint. All you lose is a little bit of progress.

Am I on the money at all?

That's one way of doing it. I would not call it a punishment though. If it where to take away something from you, like say money, then that would be a punishment. Having checkpoints is simply a nice feature that makes a game far more accessible to people who do not have the skill, time or patience to play it otherwise.

I can definitely understand that point of view then, and can agree that having games that are accessible to people of those and other criteria makes sense. However it still is a very subjective thing to say that such more punishing consequences for death are damaging games as a whole. It very much objectively helps the industry and leaves room for the creation of the less punishing games, or vice versa, to have the harder ones around as well. Its like the old pasta sauce recipe story: there is no perfect sauce, only perfect sauces. same for games....there is no perfect game, only perfect games ^^ I suppose the easier way to sum things up is to say everyone has got opinions, but *shrugs* feels a bit like a cop out XD

 

[Hosker]

It's really not that difficult. Sure, I died a lot, but frequent checkpoints and infinite lives make progression easy.

 

[The_Echo]

The great thing about Shovel Knight, though, is that you can work around what would otherwise be bullshit.

There's a suit of armor you can buy that keeps your footing when hit. And there are TONS of subweapons to counter whatever is in your way.

The whole knockback thing reminds me more of Mega Man than it does Castlevania. And the only time I found it truly frustrating was during Propeller Knight's stage (which had other factors making things worse). Even then, it didn't take long to adapt.

 

[Jopoho]

I sort of agree with the medusa head complaint, but from a different angle. Some of them are easy to counter with sub-weapons in such a way that you don't come into danger. However, a lot of the medusa enemies clip through walls, which means you have to wait for them to come into the open before you can deal with them. Sometimes you can rush through and avoid them when this happens, but rushing gets risky. There's a few screens that I wish had a better balance between stopping and waiting for a baddie and rushing through, knock back be damned.

Still, on the whole it is a fantastic experience and I would encourage anyone curious to pick it up. The checkpoints are frequent and money can usually be recovered without much hassle (especially with the right Ichor), and most of the time it feels really good to play.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Just finished it a few minutes ago (95% item find so I saw the majority of what the game has to offer) and I really can't say that I saw anything that really stood out to me as cheap or poorly designed. Sure there are some tough parts but overall the checkpoints are frequent enough and money's easy enough to recover that it's pretty much never an issue. In fact, money's not really even important anyway as there's not that many things to buy. All told, the game actually didn't feel all that difficult simply because of the frequent checkpoints and the little penalty for dying.

If you're looking for a taste of some fine old school but in a slightly more accesible format, you owe it to yourself to pick up Shovel Knight. Don't let the "it's too hard/cheap" talk in the review scare you off.