Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight is a tribute to the eight-bit era that didn't stop at nostalgic packaging but truly understood why the old platformers were so good. The hero is a knight armed with a shovel, which he uses to slash enemies, dig treasure out of walls, and above all as a spring, aiming it downward to bounce off enemies' heads, lamps, and falling rocks. This single move defines the entire game: the pogo bounce is a weapon, a means of movement, and a way to clear a trap, and the game builds most of its ideas around it.

The structure draws on the classics. On the map you select levels that end with a fight against one of the members of the Order of No Quarter, each with their own theme, their own set of mechanics, and their own musical motif. Between expeditions you can shop in towns, expand your stamina, buy relics with side abilities, and upgrade your armor. The difficulty is high but fair, since checkpoints are placed sensibly, and the player can voluntarily smash them for treasure, which is one of the most elegant ways to offer extra challenge without separate difficulty settings.

The graphics honor the limits of consoles of the era but allow themselves a wider palette and smoother animation, so it looks the way we remember old games looking, not how they actually looked. The chiptune soundtrack ranks among the most highly praised in the modern indie scene, and its melodies stick in your head long after finishing the game. The Vita version was released alongside other Sony console versions and looks excellent on the small display, since pixel art doesn't need a large screen. The game came out of a very successful Kickstarter campaign and became a textbook example of how to see such a project through to completion, including free expansions with playable villains that gradually turned the original game into a large package of several campaigns. Critics received the title enthusiastically and ranked it among the best games of its year regardless of budget. To this day, Shovel Knight remains one of the best modern platformers ever made, and on Vita it plays perfectly naturally.