Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight is a tribute to eight-bit platformers that doesn't stop at nostalgia and in many ways surpasses its inspirations. You play a knight armed with a shovel, setting out across the land to defeat an order of evil knights and rescue his lost companion. The structure is classic: a world map, an optional order of several levels, treasures hidden in side paths, and a fight against a distinctive boss at the end of each stage. The shovel serves as both weapon and tool, since a downward pogo-jump lets you bounce off enemies and obstacles much like in the legendary games that inspired it.

The level design is remarkably careful. Every stage introduces its own idea, whether shifting gravity, moving platforms, or an environment that changes shape, and before a motif has a chance to wear thin, the game exhausts it and moves on. Alongside your basic gear you collect relics with secondary abilities and upgrade your armor, so you can choose to be tougher, more mobile, or better armed. The difficulty is well balanced, and the game offers an interesting compromise: checkpoints can be smashed in exchange for treasure, letting you fine-tune the challenge yourself.

The audiovisual side faithfully imitates the NES era, but with larger palettes, smoother scrolling, and effects the hardware of the time could never have handled. On PC the game runs on virtually anything, supports both gamepad and keyboard, and offers display options including aspect ratio. The chiptune music ranks among the most quoted independent soundtracks ever, and many of its tracks hold up well as standalone listening. The project came to life through a successful Kickstarter campaign, and the creators gradually delivered on their promises with sprawling campaigns for each of the evil knights, which together form the Treasure Trove collection. Today Shovel Knight is the standard other retro platformers are measured against. Anyone wanting to see it all faces several full-fledged campaigns, each of which changes movement and combat enough that it feels more like a separate game than a mere expansion.