Nostalgia is a force of nature.
This is a thank you letter to indie game developer, Yacht Club Games. I recently downloaded and played through their inaugural title, Shovel Knight 3 times. (I played it on the Wii U, but the game is currently also available for PC and Nintendo 3DS)
Shovel Knight is designed to be like an old-school NES title in it's graphics, soundtrack and difficulty. Seriously the game is tough as nails...you know, in a good way. An action platformer, Shovel Knight is a mixture of Mega Man, Duck Tales, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Castlevania 2. (am I missing anything?) It scratched an itch that I had for years but couldn't reach. Part of Yacht Club's reason for making Shovel Knight in the first place was the lack of these kinds of games over the past couple of years. Mega Man 9 and 10 were great retro style games, and proved that there's still a market and demand for them, but they were sequels with a gameplay formula that was already established. Shovel Knight is a new IP from the ground up.
But what makes Shovel Knight so good? It can't all be nostalgia, or else we'd get bored after the first level. Yacht Club proves that gameplay is king. (level design plays a pretty big factor in this genre as well) How else do you sell 150,000 of something that looks like it came from the 80s in a month? You need to have a damn good game. Sure, our yearning for the glory days of the NES hooked us but our thirst for great gameplay kept us on the line.
So thank you, Yacht Club. Shovel Knight rocks.
