It’s in your best interests to collect as many gems as possible on your way down, as this will directly give you more ability to buy relics, upgrades, and healing items if you happen to come across a shop. Shovel Knight Dig certainly adheres to the ‘rich-get-richer’ philosophy where effective play is rewarded with boons that make the game even easier, while playing poorly will make things even harder for you the longer you go on. Given this, there’s a delicious kind of tension to every minute of your run. Most of the time, you don’t even know it’s there, but if you’re taking too much time fooling around and trying to snap up every gem and collectable, it’ll catch up to you fast and kill you instantly. You’d think the solution would be to simply take things slow and play it safe, but there is constantly a huge, invincible buzzsaw drill bearing down on you from above. Most failures, then, aren’t because you hit a brick wall that you simply couldn’t get past, but rather they're deaths by a thousand cuts as every miscalculated jump and rough enemy encounter adds up to eventually take a final toll. You don’t really have that much health to begin each run, and though this can later be expanded via shops and upgrades, healing items are typically pretty sparse. Suffice it to say, the difficulty is brutal, but not necessarily unfair.

You retain some of your collected gems from each run, but otherwise lose all upgrades and inventory items that weren’t already permanent. Each time you fall in battle, you’re brought back to the surface and have to try it all over again. Each run is divided up into biomes composed of three levels, with a final fourth level consisting of a boss fight with that area’s resident knight. You play as the titular blue knight and start each run by jumping into the hole, with the goal simply being to get to the bottom as fast as possible while collecting as much as you can on the way down.

Gameplay could be best described as what the original Shovel Knight game would look like if it was made with the design philosophy of Downwell. The ‘lore’ isn’t very heavy here, so franchise first-timers won’t feel like they’re missing out on much, but those who have played previous releases will appreciate seeing how this fits in.Ĭaptured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked) For example, it’s cool to see Shovel Knight and Shield Knight’s relationship played out in more than the brief flashbacks we get elsewhere in the series, and interacting with earlier incarnations of Mole Knight and Tinker Knight from before their time in the Order of No Quarter provides some cool insights into the characters.

Even so, what’s here creates a certain amount of intrigue as you can’t help but wonder what awaits you at the bottom of the hole, and series fans will appreciate the many nods to other titles that take place later on in the Shovel Knight timeline. Obviously, the story isn’t much of a focus here, as this is a highly replayable roguelite platformer first and foremost. Their efforts to do so-and the enormous hole they’ve created-are creating problems for the people on the surface, so Shovel Knight and Shield Knight dive in to try to get to the bottom of what’s going on. Here, the main villain is a new character named Drill Knight, who has formed a group of knights called the Hexcavators to help him in raiding a treasure room buried somewhere deep within the earth. Shovel Knight Dig takes place sometime before the original Shovel Knight, so Shield Knight hasn’t disappeared yet and the Enchantress has yet to rise to power and form the Order of No Quarter.

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