Video Gamers Podcast - Diggin’ Deep with Shovel Knight - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

Gaming Knight Josh and Host Knight Paul are charging into your ear holes with this week's amazing episode on Shovel Knight! An iconic, classic gaming homage to the classic platformers of yester-year, we break down everything you could want to know on this gaming classic. From levels to bosses and everything in between, you’ll dig this episode for sure! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad  Thanks to Razer for sponsoring the show. Use code: Multiplayer at checkout for your free gift!   Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's deep dive episode is brought to you by Razer. Want to lose the wires? Razer makes the best wireless gaming gear available. With three times faster wireless technology, you can make sure that you are confident in your gear. You can pick up your amazing headsets, mice, keyboards, or any other wireless tech over at multiplayerpodcast.com slash Razer.

Enter code multiplayer at checkout. They're going to send you some amazing wireless gear along with a free gift. Now on to Shovel Knight. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are so excited to have you here with us today. Since it is a Monday, we have a full hour-long episode here where the two of us who are dads will be breaking down something in regards to gaming.

Today just happens to be a deep dive episode, and we are very excited to be breaking down all things Shovel Knight. If you have not already done so, make sure to rate our podcast five stars and leave us a review. We do occasionally read them on the show, and rumor has it we might be reading one here in just a minute. But first, we need some introductions. I am your host, Paul. And then joining me, he is the Troll Knight himself. It's Josh. That is the perfect knight for me. I just need a bridge that's at the top of the level.

And then that way I can just be the troll that's under the bridge, man. I debated whether you were going to be the Troll Knight or the Bald Knight, and I thought Troll Knight would be a little bit funnier slash nicer. You could have just been the bald Troll Knight. And then I'd be like, ouch. You could be the Beard Knight. Ouch, Paul. You could be the Beard Knight as well.

That would work. I feel like just, you know, cower at the glory of my beard. So today we have a very special episode because we are going to be covering Shovel Knight at the request of one of our legendary supporters. So Ace of Shame, who's been a long-term supporter of the show, he is a huge fanatic when it comes to all things Shovel Knight. This is the game that he asked us to pick up and play. So Josh, you and I picked up The Treasure Trove.

We have so much to talk about with this gaming series. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. But before we jump into that, you've got a review to read for the people, right? Yeah, we've been slacking on reading some of these reviews. And like I said, we want to remind people, reviewing the show is super helpful for us. I mean, let's be honest. When people are looking for a podcast, they type in Gaming Podcast. And the more reviews we have, the higher up in those rankings we are. So they are super helpful if you've ever wanted to just help support the show. Leaving a review is one of the best ways to do that.

I know that our Android users, maybe they're not on Apple Podcasts. It's not as easy to leave reviews. I've always said, hey, it's okay. I'm sure you have a friend that has an iPhone. Just borrow their iPhone, go to the podcast app, buy multiplayer podcasts, leave us a review. leave reviews. I've always said, hey, it's okay. I'm sure you have a friend that has an iPhone. Just borrow their iPhone, go to the podcast app, buy a multiplayer podcast, leave us a review. It still helps that way. We don't hold it against you if you're an Android user around here. Some of us might even like you more than the Apple users. But luckily, between me and Josh, we've got one Apple fan and one Android fan. You can probably figure out.

We've got the bases covered there so but it is time for a review we read every single review that comes in they really mean the world to us it's just really cool to see what people think about the show um all right but this one comes in from raven mc five star review and it's titled favorite podcast i like where this is going this is my favorite podcast i started off listening while i was mowing and has turned into listening every day at work. I love how your personalities mesh and sometimes have a Top Gear vibe on how you disagree. Please keep up the great work. Signed, Ryan Radio.

Let's not let Ryan Radio hear our arguments about Apple and Android because those ones have not been terribly simple in our private texting and discord messages it is funny because we do disagree a lot on the show we disagree politely behind the scenes

sometimes it's a lot more of Paul you're freaking crazy man I don't know how you can think that. Oh, well, thank you so much for the nice review. We always love getting those. And, you know, Apple IDs are totally free. So as long as you have an email address, go make one. You can leave us a review.

You can download iTunes, I think, and you can still even leave a review in there, even though iTunes isn't really used anymore. But yeah, there's tons of ways to leave a review and we would greatly appreciate it so thank you so much to what was the name Raven MC Raven MC yeah thank you all right well Josh any other housekeeping or are we ready to jump into Shovel Knight no I think we're ready, man. It's time to dig in, Paul. Let's dig in. All right. The Shovel Knight Treasure Trove is what Josh and I picked up here over the last couple of weeks. This game's a little bit older than I realized. It released all the way back in June of 2014. And here's the description that Steam gives. Shovel Knight Treasure Trove is the complete Shovel Knight collection containing all five games in the epic saga. Dig, blast, slash, and bash your way through a fantastical 8-bit inspired world of pixel-perfect platforming,

memorable characters, and world-class action-adventure gameplay. Now, Josh, can you say pixel perfect platforming 10 times fast? Pixel perfect platforming. Pixel perfect platforming. Pixel perfect. I'm good at tongue twisters, man. Yeah. Yeah. That's a tough one. So in the Treasure Trove, we will talk a little bit about all five games. I think we will be spending the most time talking about Shovel of Hope, which is the main OG campaign. And then over time, additional DLCs have been added. We will touch on all of them, although the other campaigns and showdown the multiplayer mode, that'll come up here near the end. Now, with Shovel Knight already being seven

years old, was this your first time playing Shovel, or did you have any kind of history with the series? I had zero history at all. I had heard of Shovel Knight when Ace told us what game, because legendary supporters get to pick a game for us to review. And Ace was saying, hey, I've got a few in mind. And then he said, nope, I know which one I want you to play. He said, I want you guys to play Shovel Knight. And then I went, did you mean Hollow Knight? Because everybody gushes about Hollow Knight and I have not played Hollow Knight. That's something I probably should do at some point.

And then he went, no, Shovel Knight. And that's when I went, oh, wait a minute. There is another night game that's real popular. I don't know when these both came out, if there's similar release dates or not. But then it kind of clicked and I went, yeah, you know what? I have heard of Shovel Knight. I've heard of that game. I feel like it's like what little I had remembered was that it was fun and goofy. And that was kind of the two things that I just popped into my brain all of a sudden. So we did the, apparently they've, like you mentioned, they've done a lot of DLC. So you can pick up this thing called the Treasure Trove, which is the base game and all of the DLC for a very good price. So if it's something where you're like, hey, this is my type of genre, don't just pay for the base game. You might as well get everything because it's all bundled together at this point. But I had never played it. And I'll be honest,

Paul, I have not played a platformer game in quite some time. Oh, see, every once in a while, I'll pick up one if I hear that it has really high reviews and I'll check it out. But somehow Shovel Knight just snuck past me. I think like you, after the first couple of years when I didn't play it, I knew that there was Hollow Knight and Shovel Knight. I knew they were both 2D games and I knew that they were platformers. I never knew which was which. I did not know anything about Shovel Knight really until we started playing it here as of recent, but I am a huge fan of platformers. So I picked up games like Celeste along the way, any Rayman game that comes

out, I always love playing. So for anyone out there who maybe does not know about Shovel Knight, despite its immense popularity, maybe there's some others like us who just somehow missed it. What would you say is the general format? What exactly is Shelvanite, other than being a platformer? It's a platformer, Paul. I mean, it is a platformer at its heart. That's what the game is. There is combat involved because some

platformers are just, hey, you got to make your way through the level. You don't fight anything. You're just trying to dodge everything, right? So it's like, don't let that bullet hit you. Don't let that creature touch you. Don't miss this moving platform or you'll fall to your death, but there's no combat. Shovel Knight actually involves a good bit of combat along with the platforming. And there are minor RPG elements to it. There are upgrades that you can get in the game. There are different armors that you can get. There's different upgrades to your weapon. You can get abilities slash inventory items that allow you to do certain things. So equipment, however you want to call it,

so you can get other stuff that helps you in the combat as well. There are boss fights, there's vastly different level designs, there's an overworld map, so you know which level you're going into. It takes the platformer genre and adds some different layers to it, which for me, I found to be very enjoyable. And I know that there's a lot of platformers out there that have done that. But the easiest way I can think of is just think old school Nintendo game, like old school Nintendo platformer, pixel graphics, cool arcade-y type music, cool boss fights, interesting you know it really brings back the nostalgia for me of the old school nintendo games yeah 100 very reminiscent of nes games i think you really nailed

the the nail on the head here basically you play platform levels don't fall down pits don't jump into spikes don't hit any enemies and then at the end of every level, you fight some kind of boss. And then at the end of the game, you get to fight the big bad. And that's really basically about it in a nutshell. Now, I do have a couple of facts about the development of Shovel Knight that I thought was interesting. And I really think we need some kind of name for this kind of segment. I could not really come up with anything good.

Delicious development. I was trying to work up with anything good. Delicious development. I was trying to work something in with that. Are you hungry, Paul? Nothing. What rhymes with development or alliteration? I really struggled with this. I was also playing around with design mind. Let's go into the design mind.

You can't use deep dive, Paul. That one's trademarked already. Yeah. Deep diving development. I don't know. So anyway, if anyone has any good ideas, I would love to hear it. Delving into development. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe something like that. Delving into development. That'll be this little section here. So Shovel Knight was made by a company called Yacht Club Games. They were founded back in 2011. And you want to know what they said, Josh? They got together and said, let's make a game that reminds us of all those great NES

games that we played growing up. So that was literally exactly how they designed this game. They said, what NES games did we love? What parts of those games did we love? And let's just mash it all into this gumbo stew, and it'll be called Shovel Knight. And so I thought that here, this would be kind of like a good segue. What parts of Shovel Knight reminded you of what NES games? Were there any in particular that kind of stand out? One stands out above all others to me, and that is Mega Man. I even called this Mega Man with a shovel on an earlier episode, because that's really at its core. That's very much how this game plays. It really does. I mean, don't get me wrong. There's a lot of differences to it, but

you can tell that it draws from Mega Man perhaps more than any other game. There are some very cool nods to other old school games that we'll talk about a little bit later, I'm sure. There's secrets in this game and stuff like that. And one of them just had me just chuckling and tickled pink. But yeah, I mean, for me, Mega Man is it because that combines the platformer with the combat and the boss fights. And unlocking new abilities. Right. And unlocking new abilities. And this follows that almost to a T. It's not a ripoff of Mega Man. It is not a clone of Mega Man by any means. It definitely is its own game. But when you say, hey, what's this flavor remind you of? To me, Mega Man, hands down. Well, even the name scheme, because in Mega Man, you would fight Metal Man, Flash Man, Heat Man. And in this game, you fight where everyone's named Knight. So I thought that even the name scheme was kind of reminiscent. You also mentioned that the game has a world layout,

which is definitely 100% just Mario 3. So Mario 3 on NES, this looks exactly the same, even to the extent that after you beat certain levels, it will randomly spawn an enemy that will walk around on the map. And if you run over it, then you get some kind of like additional level or boss fight. So I felt like they definitely borrowed, not rip off, but heavily inspired certainly mario 3 certainly megaman 2 i think in particular and even the village where you get to buy gear does that remind you of zelda it looked so much like zelda to me absolutely yeah i thought that too man yeah there's like a little 2d side scroller village that you can go into and there's npcs that wander around and you can talk to everybody. That's where the blacksmith and the armor are and where you can get upgrades and your different equipment slots and stuff like that.

So there is definitely you need to go to the village. But yeah, it was very reminiscent of Zelda where you're walking around and trying to talk to people and stuff. Yeah, and where you could go inside the buildings. Yeah, absolutely. Now, the development team, they liked the idea of having some kind of weapon where they could flip an enemy over onto their belly and then be able to drive the weapon down for a vertical attack. And so they got together, and the only weapon they could think of where this made sense

would be a shovel. So it's funny because I always assumed that by using a shovel as a weapon, it was purely for comedy reasons, because who would design a game around fighting enemies with a shovel? I was a little surprised that it actually did come out of necessity. They actually liked the idea of getting like that kind of insect walking on the floor, flip it over, jump on top of your shovel and just kind of insect walking on the floor, flip it over, jump on top of your shovel and just kind of pile drive it into the ground and killing the enemy. I was going to go as far as to say this is the only game that has really a shovel as a weapon. But then I remembered Far Cry 5, where you could run around and chuck shovels.

There are people who have beaten Far Cry 5 only using shovels as weapons. So I guess it's not technically the only game that uses a shovel. I did not understand why this knight, who is in full armor with a horned helm, I mean, he looks the part, is running around with a shovel. Like, why? It's very funny. But then early on in the game when you first get to the village there's a guard that says you know hey fair knight this village is peaceful you must leave your weapon to be able to enter and then you just kind of look at it and you're like it's a shovel and then the guard goes oh yeah that's a shovel you're good go on in yeah like what like what other ideas like spatula night like i don't know what other things they they considered um they actually once they decided to use the shovel

they were down to two final names it was either going to be shovel night or plummet night and i think they definitely picked the right name here i I think they picked the right one. I mean, yes, they picked the right one. I understand why they would have gone with Plummet Knight, because we can get into the different moves in a little bit. But for me, I played this game as if I was the Plummet Knight. Yeah. You know, more than anything. The shovel's basically a pogo stick.

It really is. Yes, exactly. If you want to be any good good that's what it is uh last fact here is just that shovel night was funded through kickstarter so they had a goal to raise 75 000 they ended up raising over 311 000 and so here yacht club games just kept plugging out new dlc for shovel, you know, that's kind of just that corner that they've carved out for themselves. All right. Now, we don't need to spend a whole lot of time on the plot because as a platformer, this is all about the gameplay.

If you were a little curious to know, basically, we find out in Shovel of Hope that Shovel Knight and Shield Knight used to be like partners. They would fight alongside one another. Shield Knight somehow gets cursed by an amulet inside this Tower of Fate. And then the big bad of the game is the Enchantress. And so she has taken over the Tower of Fate. And as Shovel Knight, you are trying to rescue Shield Knight. But in order to get into the Tower and then to fight the Enchantress,

you do have to go through all of these villains that the enchantress has recruited and hired to be on her team the order of no quarter paul the order of no quarter and you're gonna have to fight your way through all of them to get to the enchantress all right so let's let's talk about gameplay all right what what do you want to talk about first like what's the first thing that stands out to you? I hate the dark levels. Is it too early for that, Paul? Can we talk about that? No, no, good.

Talk about it. They hit you with it pretty early on. Gameplay-wise, it's a platformer. You move from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen. Sometimes you need to go up. Sometimes you need to go down. It's a side-scroller. It's 2D.

I mean, if somebody has not played a platformer before, then this episode is going to make no sense whatsoever. But if you've ever seen a platformer, then you know exactly what we're talking about. And in Shovel Knight, it's a platformer with combat. You come across a monster or a bug or whatever. You swing your shovel at it just like you would a sword. It totally makes sense. It just clicks.

But the other thing that you can do is you can jump up in the air and press down and hit your button, your attack button. And instead, you'll do like this pile drive with your shovel down under you. And then you can bounce off of things. So that's why we called it like a pogo stick, because if you plummet down into something and hit it, your guy will bounce back up into the air. And that's actually a fairly used mechanic in this game when you're trying to jump over very large pits and stuff like that. But one thing that stands out to me in this is the level design. Because for a platformer, if you don't have interesting levels, well, then guess what? People are going to get bored very quickly. And I feel like it was maybe the second or third level in this game early where it's you know

atmospheric there's a there's a storm going on in the background and you can see lightning and stuff you go through the first couple like stages of this level no biggie and then all of a sudden you're further into this and now the lights are off yeah let's go out the lights go out platforms and you can't see you cannot see now the only time you can see was when there is a flash of lightning yeah and then it lights up the the stage that you're on for just a split second and that's when i went oh you dirty dogs man are you kidding me? You want me to platform in the dark? Yeah. And I just, that was when I kind of like evilly chuckled to myself and went like,

that's such an evil thing to do. And then after I died for like the 30th time, I went, I hate you. Why would anybody do this? See, you started Shovel Knight, I want to say like one or two days before i did and i remember that being the very first thing you posted where you said they're making me play in the dark you know and and that was definitely one of the things that stuck out uh one of the bosses also uses that mechanic where they turn out all the lights and so they definitely make it very hard to time jumping on platforms and attacking enemies when you can't see. I think one of the big things that sticks out to me is the gold system in the game. So most platformers, you just have a certain number of lives, right? Like if you're playing

Mario, you've got your five lives. And if you die, the level restarts. In Shovel Knight, it's completely different you have unlimited lives but what happens is over the course of every level you are collecting gems and every time you touch one it adds to your gold counter in the top left and then if you end up dying and in this game you have like the zelda system you have hearts and each time you get hit you lose a heart and so if you fall down a pit or lose all your hearts, then your character will drop bags of gold that float in the air, and then you start the level over. But then once you get back to that section, you can jump over those bags and recover your gems at that point. But if you die before you

recover them, well, those gems are now just lost. So you actually never run out of lives. You can play this game until you beat it, which is for better or worse. I kind of felt like dying doesn't really matter anymore at this point. It's just kind of like a lost one to two minutes, and then you're right back where you were. Yeah. It should be said that the more gems... So the more you collect these gems, they're kind of the hidden part of it. There's treasure chests that are very hard to get to. If you can get to some of them behind secret walls or some levels, you'll be on a stage and it's like, if you continue up and to the left, you can go somewhere or you can just keep running right. And it feels like that's probably towards the boss or wherever you're supposed to go. But this game does reward exploration. And so if you explore a little bit, you get a little bit off the beaten path. Maybe you have to complete this difficult jumping puzzle

to get over to this other side of the stage. And there's a big treasure chest. So then your knight gets in there, he opens it up, he starts rooting through it. All these gems start flying out and you get like 300 gold worth of gems, which is great. But the reason that you want those is because when you go to the village, you can spend those gems to upgrade your health, to upgrade your mana, to buy armor, to upgrade your weapon,

to buy equipment and stuff like that. So there is a necessity there to collect these things. I think I've mentioned this before, but games where you just collect things for no reason don't jive with me. I'll use Spyro the Dragon back in the day, Banjo-Kazooie. I loved Banjo-Kazooie and I liked Spyro, but those games haven't aged with me because it's like, why am I collecting this stuff? Why am I putting all this effort into going through this level to collect some arbitrary thing, whether it's rings or tokens or totems or whatever? Why am I doing this? And if there's not a reason other than, well, it gives you a high score, that doesn't click with me anymore. It did when I was a kid. It was great. But for now,

it's like, okay, I need to be more productive. So I like the fact that the gold in this game matters. And it matters when you die, because if you have like 4,000 gold on you, that's a lot. And you lose, I think, is it half or all of it when you die? You lose a good percentage. I don't know how much. And that also goes into some of the armor, because some of those things change how it works. But yeah, you drop a certain percentage. So you drop a certain percentage, and then you're like, oh no, I just lost like a thousand gold, which is a lot. I was saving up to buy another like health bar or heart or whatever it is. Right. So it's like, you don't want to lose your money. And it's great that when you get back to where you died, that you can collect that. Like,

I actually really like that aspect of it. It's almost like in dark souls. When you go to recover your souls from your corpse, like there is a definite reason why you want to go back there the problem with that is like if i fall down a pit and i die these bags pop out and they start floating but sometimes they're where you can't get them they're floating down at the bottom of the pit and then i'm like well this sucks i can't get my stuff back but then other times they'd be near the edge of a ledge. And so it's like, you have to decide, is it worth the risk to jump out over this ledge and hope that I can turn around and land safely without dying again? Or should I just say, hey, you know what? I'm not worried about that little bit of gold. I'm

going to keep going at that point. So I actually really enjoyed that dynamic of it because it added something to the game. It added a consequence for death because like you said, you have infinite lives. And in a platformer, the difficulty has to come from somewhere. And if you can just fall and splat and fall and splat and fall and splat, and there's really no repercussion to that other than maybe 20 seconds of repeating, getting back to where you were. Super Meat Boy. Right? Yeah, exactly. So it's like, I feel like the death system does truly enhance the game. I do recall there were a few times where it was like, I need to get these bags back. They're floating over this pit. Can I make this jump? Oh no, I just fell again. And now I lost a bigger percentage of my money you

know that kind of thing so well that's kind of a nice transition because sometimes you do lose those bags and they fall out like over a pit this game has fishing josh and guess what you can do you can use that fishing pole and you can grab those treasure bags you can also literally fish i know you could fish you can use the fishing pole to get your bags that are floating down at the bottom of the pit. You sure can, Josh. Oh my goodness, Paul. That's one of the ways you can recover your gear. Why do you not tell me these things while we're playing these games?

Because we just wait to talk about it on the show. Yeah, you can use your fishing pole to grab those bags near the bottom of the screen. Man. Now, I did not expect this game to have fishing. That really did crack me up because any game, whenever I see a fishing pole, it's the first thing I buy, whether it's an MMO or an RPG, whatever it is, and I'll start fishing in games. I don't know why. Maybe I'm a psychopath, but I love doing it. And so in this game, every once in a while, you'll see sparkles over a certain pit. And then if you use your fishing pole, you might get a couple additional gems,

or you might actually catch a fish that you can end up putting into a bottle, and it gives you a special ability. You can use it later. So that's a very funny part of this game, too, because I certainly did not see fishing being a part of a platformer game. This might be the only one that does that. And what are fish doing at the bottom of a void anyway and they talk to you they talk to you when you pull them up out of the ground it's very funny but you know it's it's just one of those extra little things that are in there i feel like shovel knight kind of does that They kind of give you like 40 different little tiny mechanics that are a part of the game.

You can play this whole game and never fish once. And it honestly will not impact your experience really at all. It's just one of those extra little morsels that you can, you know, grab and enjoy that's in there if you choose to. Right. Now, let me ask you a question. Were you at all confused with the checkpoint system in the beginning, or was that just me? I don't know. We got to talk about this for a

minute. Did you destroy all the checkpoints like I did? No, I did not. I didn't even know you could destroy one until I was doing the little pogo bounce thing, and I hit one, and I noticed that my guy bounced off of it, but it cracked. So in this game, the checkpoints look like trophies almost. It's like a trophy that's holding a glass globe at the top of it. And you need those checkpoints because this game's not easy. And so it's like, oh yes, I made it to a checkpoint. Yay. Your progression is saved. You're good to go. Unless you quit the game, in which case then you got to start the level all over again. This is not like a quick save. You better good to go. Unless you quit the game, in which case, then you got to start the level all over again. This is not like a quick save.

This is you better beat the whole level if you're going to sit down and play the level. But if you make it to the checkpoint, you don't have to go too far back. And one time I was doing something and I hit the little glass globe. I noticed my guy bounced off of it and it cracked it. And then I went, wait a minute. What is that? So I started pogo bouncing on it. And I shattered the globe. And apparently, I got a gem out of it.

So I got a couple hundred gold or whatever. And then I was like, what did I just do? Because now you've wiped out that checkpoint. Yeah, it's gone. But you got extra gold. And you don't get to respawn at that checkpoint if you break it. So I'm like, is this just for masochists that want to break all their checkpoints and hope they don't die this is not a joke i played the first i would say 40 of this game not knowing those were

checkpoints i was going crazy because i would die on a boss or at the end of a level, and it would show the checkpoints, and they were all Xs. Now, I'm sure the game teaches you in the beginning, okay? I'm sure it's in there. I'm sure they tell you this is a checkpoint, and maybe they even tell you you can destroy them, okay? But it was in one ear, out the other, or I wasn't paying attention, and I kept wondering, how am I missing all these checkpoints? So I would play, and in the beginning, I could beat a lot of the levels. I might die once. And they're kind of short.

It was not really a big deal. But I remember there was one level in particular. I kept dying on the boss. And I would have missed all six checkpoints. And I'm hitting every part of every wall, thinking every checkpoint must be behind hidden passages. And I must be like every checkpoint must be behind hidden passages and I must be missing them and I literally I was getting ready to finally say this game really sucks because I had no checkpoints and I actually searched on reddit for shovel knight checkpoints and the first one I

found was a guy saying lol I'm such an idiot I just discovered that if you don't attack these little golden stands with the glass, they're actually checkpoints. And once I discovered that, this game became, I'm going to say 2% as difficult as it was when you try to just one-shot the full levels. So you destroyed every checkpoint you came across?

Yes, all of them. I thought they were all literally just gems for the taking. I did not realize it was a checkpoint because I'm just a moron. Yeah. I had no idea. I was like, all right. Yeah. Oh, here's another one. Chop, chop, chop, grab that pink gem and carry on. That is the funniest thing I've ever heard, man. I knew there were checkpoints right away. I didn't even know you could break them until I was two thirds through the game. I was the exact opposite. So, yeah, I'm just an idiot.

So don't listen to me about anything. That's that's that is hilarious, Paul. And how frustrating. Like, oh, it was frustrating out there. I can't think of one off the top of my head. But the worst games ever made are the ones where you have to go through the whole level before you fight the boss. And if you die to the boss, which you will, you have to go all the way back to the level. Every game should have a checkpoint before a boss, just hands down. And I like difficult games, but that's just a given. We expect certain things as gamers.

If you make me go through an entire level to fight the boss to die to go through the entire level again, I hate you. I can't believe you played this game like that, man. Oh, I couldn't either. I felt so dumb. So don't destroy the checkpoints, and you will enjoy this game a lot more. I enjoyed the last 60% of this game so much more than the first 40%, I gotta say. I probably played like two to three hours more than I needed to, just because of replaying the full levels.

That's amazing. It should have clicked with me earlier. i don't know why it didn't sometimes i just get tunnel vision you didn't notice when you died that it shows your guy like moving back to the to the checkpoints no i did i just i didn't know i figured i was doing something wrong and not activating checkpoints or they were just hidden so yeah yeah, it's so funny. All right. We just want to take a short break here to say thank you to Razer. They have partnered with us and we are very excited to talk about their wireless products that they currently have. They have things like the Viper Ultimate, which is an eSports ready mouse. They've got the Black Shark V2 Pro headset, the Black Widow V3 Pro keyboard, and their

wireless technology is really good. It's three times faster than any other wireless gaming technology. And they also use adaptive frequency technology. And I know that that's like a really fancy phrase, but what it means is that it is constantly scanning all available wireless channels and using the ones that are completely open that don't have any interference. So that means that all of your gear is going to be running with as little lag as possible. You don't need to worry about any interference with other wireless things in your

home. So if you're playing those first-person shooters or if you're part of any competitions, all of the Razer wireless gear is going to work for you beautifully well. If you want to check out any of those products, you can head over to multiplayerpodcast.com slash Razer. That'll take you to their store. Go ahead and take a look, see everything that they have available. Just make sure to enter promo code multiplayer, and they will send you a free gift along with your gear. All right, Josh, let's talk about a couple final things here about gameplay before we move on to our other segments here in the show. Let's talk a little bit about the relics, because I think the relics are... Relics! That's what they're called!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can call them equipment, man. I was having the biggest brain fart, and I'm like, well, I'm just going to call these equipment. I know that's not what the game calls them, but relics. Yes. Yes, they are called relics. This is honestly the main thing you're going to use your gold for other than upgrades to your armor and your weapon. But the relics are basically items that get permanently added to your inventory. And they basically give you magical abilities.

So there are several in the game. I don't know if we necessarily need to talk about all of them, but the different ones that you have available are the Flare Wand, Dust Knuckles, the Alchemy Coin, a Warhorn, Phase Locket, Throwing Anchor, Mobile Gear, Propeller Dagger, and Chaos Sphere. And basically all of these different relics require mana, and they all use different amounts of mana. So as you play the game, you kind of figure out which relics are going to work best on the level that you're in and how much mana they use. Were there any relics in particular that you enjoyed or ones that you relied on more than the others?

Yeah, I'll be honest with you. This is going to touch on one thing that I thought that this game didn't do so well. And I like the relic system. I like that it adds to the gameplay. But there's a couple relics that are just so much better than everything else out there that, at least for me, I found that I very, very rarely got away from. The phase locket. Uh-huh. I mean, I'll be honest. I don't, I rarely used anything else. What the phase locket does is it turns you invulnerable

for, I want to say like maybe a second and a half, like two seconds, right? Like it's just, but it can be an absolute lifesaver. If you touch a spike in this game, if one arm hair touches a spike, you're dead. But if you are in midair and you look down and you go, oh no, and you know you're going to hit those spikes, you can activate the phase locket and you can legit run along the spikes for a second. Now you've got to... Are you feeling lucky, punk? Because it's kind of hard to

time when it wears off. You don't really get a warning when it's going to wear off. So if you're still touching the spikes when it wears off, poof, you're dead. But the phase locket was, for me, just hands down the best item in the game. You could use it during a boss fight when a boss was going crazy and shooting out tons of stuff. It's like, I'm just going to sit here and phase lock until that's over. Now, it does use mana. And so you can't use it just all willy-nilly, and your mana does run out pretty quick.

But for me, that was hands down the best relic in the entire game. I also liked one that I got very early, which is just the... I don't know the name. I'm terrible at remembering the names of these things, but it was just a little green ball that kind of bounces on the ground. The chaos sphere. Was that the chaos? It sounds way cooler than it looks. Yeah. The green glob. Yeah. It's just a bouncing green blob. But that would absolutely wreck certain bosses because it didn't disappear when it hit a boss. It would like bounce through them, hit them a couple of times, ricochet off the wall, bounce back through them, hit them a couple of times before it finally wore off.

And there were one or two bosses that I just obliterated. Like they'd get into a corner and I would just dump all of my mana all at once. Like I'd shoot out like five of these balls and then it would take off like, you know, nine out of their 10 hearts. They'd be almost dead already. Yeah. You know, a lot of them were like that. The anchor. So the anchor is like you throw it and it arcs. And so it can hit things on an arc level. The flame wand just shoots out a little fireball in a straight line.

So a lot of them were like iterations on that. The most useless one for me was the gear. Did you ever use the gear? I wrote down in my notes, I did not use the mobile gear until preparing for the show today. I beat the whole game and I never used it once. It's kind of a neat idea,

but it's not terribly useful. You kind of just chuck down a wheel with a platform on top and you can jump on it and it'll just keep moving forward. So it's like a nice way to cover long pits or just to travel fast from one side of the screen to the other. But I don't know that it was really all that useful. Yeah. I used it once to go like, Oh, what's this? And then I saw what it was and I was like, yeah, nope. I don't know what I'm ever going to use. It was too complicated. You had to like yeah you had to you know pull it up as the relic that you wanted to use

then you had to activate it then you had to jump on it but you had to time the jump on it to when it would start moving and it just didn't seem i i thought for sure like this is going to lead to some secret area somewhere in one of these levels and it's the only way you're going to be able to make it to that secret area but i just didn't even bother yeah i i'm definitely with you in that i almost always used the phase locket and i would occasionally just switch out temporarily if it was a boss where clearly you could kind of tell what weapon to use uh i would even say i didn't even really use the relics all that much. I didn't either. I would say probably 93% of my damage done was pogo sticking on enemies. Oh, 100%. I used the relics occasionally, but I felt like they were almost just like a second afterthought.

Like, yes, they're there, and yes, you can buy mana, or you can increase your mana so that you can use them more often. But it's not like they were even clunky to use necessarily, because you just had to push up on the thumbstick and then hit the X button or whatever it was. So you could use them very easily. I just didn't. It felt weird to me to try to focus on that when you're focusing on platforming and swinging your shovel. And like you said, the strongest ability in this game is the pogo sticking. Like on bosses, on just little trash mobs, if you jump and you get above a boss and you down thrust him, you'll bounce off, but you can just sit there and chain it over and over and over again like a pogo stick. Now, certain bosses in the game get wise to that. So they start like poking upwards or they have like, you know,

a horned helmet. So you can't, you know, you can't do that. But yeah, the pogo sticking in this game was I played almost the entire game exclusively that way. Like there were a few times there I'd swing my shovel and I don't know if that's intended or not, but I feel like maybe if you and I both drifted that direction, then a lot of people probably figured out that this is a much better and easier way to play the game. Yeah, the pogo sticking was just the most fun for me. So it was like the relics were there. I'd use them if I needed, but the pogo sticking was fun enough that I didn't feel the need to use anything else unless it was a boss that's flying and you had to use the anchor or something like that. I don't think we really need to talk about upgrades a whole lot.

You can upgrade your armor and your weapon. Honestly, they don't really make much of a difference other than it changes the color of the things. I don't know about you, but I upgraded my shovel so that every time I swung it, it would send a spark on the ground. Yeah, if you were at full health, yeah. And it would only go out like six feet in front of me. And I was like, well, this is kind of, I honestly don't think I ever hit a single enemy with the spark, but it looked neat. It did. I got the one where you could charge your shovel swing and then it would glow and then you'd do this super strong swipe thing and no lie paul i bought that upgrade and i completely forgot about it for like the next two levels and and then i was finally like wait didn't i buy something i realized like oh yeah

i can sit there and hold x and charge this up and it would one-shot things but again it just like it just wasn't necessary yeah now you not when you can pogo stick. Yeah, exactly. Now, I will say this. There are these annoying creatures in the game. They look like knights. And they will block up above them or stab upwards if you try to pogo stick them so that you can't do that. But then they would also block your sword swing.

So they were very annoying. But the one thing they couldn't block was the charge up sword swing. And so that's when I was like, okay, this made this part of the game, or at least these mobs, a lot easier to deal with. But there wasn't a lot of them. And I just, like I said, it was just kind of an afterthought to that. It's nice that they're there, but they just don't really add to the game, in my opinion. Well, we definitely need to talk about the actual bosses of this game. So there are eight knights that you fight against. There is King Knight, Specter Knight, Treasure Knight, Mole Knight, Plague Knight, Polar Knight, Propeller Knight, and Tinker Knight. Were there any in particular that you wanted to talk about?

Any mechanics they used or any that you liked or disliked? I'll be honest. Because the names are so similar, a lot of these blend together in my mind. Propeller Knight was annoying because you couldn't pogo stick him because he had a propeller on his head. So that would damage you. And I was like, oh, what do I do now? I'm so used to this. No!

Well, he would run his propeller and shoot you in the air and then hold his sword in the air to impale you. So you would have to intentionally fly left or right, so that way you wouldn't land on him. Yeah. I feel like... Was it polar? This is the one problem with having everybody have the same... What I do remember is the boss fights were extremely fun. We haven't said this yet, but the one thing that Shovel Knight does better than just about anything else, in my opinion, was it had the perfect difficulty level. For me, anyway, I would die multiple times on a stage. I would die multiple times fighting some of the bosses. And that was okay because, like I said, for me, I was using checkpoints, Paul.

I don't know about you. Yeah. But it was never a long run to get back to where I was. But that was the one thing that stood out to me more than anything else is I was like, if I was going to make a platformer and I wanted the difficulty to be dialed in absolutely perfectly, Shovel Knight is the ideal example of that, in my opinion. Certain bosses were super easy. There were multiple boss fights that I won first try. And I don't know if that was from doing pogo sticking or it was just very easy to gauge the patterns in what was going on. But I recall, I want to say probably three or four of the bosses that I beat on just the first attempt.

But the trade-off there was that the level was hard and I would die a ton during the level, you know what I mean? Or vice versa. So I feel like they really balanced those two things out. Yeah, the difficulty, I'm just going to put a little bit of a pin in that for my thoughts because i'll i'll i'll share that in a second here i really loved king knight king knight was one of the funnier boss fights in the game because he's literally a king he's got a long robe and he

wears a crown he's got a setter confetti that would pop out yeah okay that fight was great he would he would call you would just be in the middle of a fight and all of a sudden he would call out and you would get like six trumpets that would shoot out on you know three on the left three on the right and they would all shoot out giant poofs of confetti that would fall from the top of the screen and the confetti would damage you so even though he was one of the absolute easiest fights in the game the confetti was just so funny like the idea of confetti being a weapon in this game and shovels and they were very inventive in that regard i think the other boss that stands out because he was really the only one that i struggled against was specter knight he was the one that was like uh like the

like the reaper with a scythe and so you had two little platforms but he would turn out the lights on you and also he would chuck out his scythe that would fly around the screen and then he would dash you and that fight was definitely one of the ones where i died a lot i probably died more on him than all the other bosses combined that was a hard fight i do remember that one and i because it was when he would dash a lot. I probably died more on him than all the other bosses combined, to be honest. That was a hard fight. I do remember that one. Because when he would dash, you would have to dodge the dash, but then land close enough to him to actually swipe at him to be able to hurt him, because then he would dash away again real quick. So that one was the timing. You had to get the

timing down right. This one wasn't a boss, but did you fight some of the random mobs that would pop up on the map and move around? Yeah, I did. I fought everyone that would pop up. There was one guy that had lightning and he would swing from one hook to the next. I can't remember the guy's name, but I died to him a pretty good bit too because he would start shooting out lightning in all directions, and you couldn't get close to him. You couldn't pogo stick him. And then when you did get close to him, he would grapple hook and swing between a couple hooks. But then when he would land on the ground, it would send out the little spark shockwaves and stuff. And so that was almost reminiscent of a side-scroller

shooter game where you're sitting there trying to dodge like 40 bullets that are flying around because there were all these lightning bolts just all over the screen. And so that was like the main mechanic there was like, hey, you got to dodge all these things and then you can get in and swipe them. Whereas a lot of other bosses, you could just sit there and just wade in and try to do as much damage as possible. Yeah. The one thing, and I guess if I'm going gonna say anything that's a spoiler in this game i mean come on it's a platformer there's really no spoilers but at the end of the game before you can move on you do end up having to fight the full gamut of all eight bosses again and this is where i was going to say this is why the difficulty was both spot on, but also very goofy.

Because so many of the bosses were just so easy that they were no trouble at all. But I almost think that was by design because they wanted you to have to fight all eight, not simultaneously, but all eight consecutively at the end of the game. And so if every single boss was like Specter Knight, no one would stick with it. Everyone would give up. So at the time when I was playing the game, I felt like, man, Treasure Knight, Propeller Knight, some of these I had to actually look up because I didn't even remember what they did

because it was just one and done. 60 seconds, they're dead. So I think that was actually kind of on purpose because you kind of had like four boss fights that were kind of tough and then four that were really easy. But then when you have to fight all eight in a row, that's an actual challenge. Yeah. Oh, it was for sure. But I do like the balance of difficulty. And that's why I say like some of the level designs too. I mean, we could talk forever on this stuff, but you know But you had the level where the lights go out. And you have to make these tiny... You have to make these precision jumps onto a platform

that's only as wide as your guy in the dark. And if you missed, you didn't even know you missed until you died because you couldn't see your guy. Another level used air and fans and stuff. So it was like these gusts would come by and it would lift you up into the air, but there's spikes along the ceiling. So you had to time it to where when you did get lifted up, you would be on this little area that was in between the spikes. But then the wind would gust you forward. And so you had to time everything to not hit the spikes in the air, but then not get shoved into the spikes that were further down to time your falling so that you could fall down the chute to then do it all again. And so a lot of the levels... I mean, I died a lot on some of these. And so there was that platformer frustration that would start to kick in. But you need that.

As much as I hate to say you need that frustration for a platformer, you need that. Like, as much as I hate to say, you need that frustration for a platformer. You need that because when you beat that level, that's where the endorphins kick in, right? Like that's where that's like, Oh yes. Oh, finally. Like I got you, man. You know? And then you just be like, Oh, please let this be an easy boss. Cause I'm done with this level at that point. Um, I, I found, like I said, for me, the difficulty level was perfect. It was easy at times difficult at times. Um, I don't think it could have been any more spot on in my opinion. Never got stuck anywhere for, for too long. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the game also has a couple optional bosses. Did you want to talk about this? Depends on which option. Well, I know there was one in particular that couple optional bosses. Did you want to talk about this? Depends on which optional boss. I mean, maybe I didn't take that option, Paul. I thought there was one in particular that you might want to talk about that you had told me that you ran into. Oh, the secret, dude. Okay. So, yes. Okay. Sorry. I got what you were going with that. So, there is, and this is what I had mentioned at the beginning of the episode too. So, what I love about this is because these guys designed this game to be a throwback to the old school Nintendo type platforming games.

There is a Hall of Champions that you come across that you have to pay a ton. It's like 5,000 gold to get in. And I don't want to spoil too much for anybody that might play the game. But within the Hall of Champions is a little bit of like an actual puzzler aspect, which I thought was really neat. And it was a breath of fresh air from the rest of the game. But within the Hall of Champions is a little bit of an actual puzzler aspect, which I thought was really neat, and it was a breath of fresh air from the rest of the game. But there's a secret somewhere in the Hall of Champions that if you find it, you wind up falling into this dungeon. And in this dungeon, a spaceship lands, and out of the spaceship come the Battletoads. The Battletoads from Nintendo lore as one of the hardest games ever

because anybody that's ever played Battletoads or looks up what's the hardest game sequence ever, the sewer sequence in Battletoads was absolutely rage-inducing. So here come the Battletoads. They're like, hey, what's up, dude? Like, you know, they're talking to you. They have no idea who you are.

They're like, look at your shovel, blah, uh blah blah blah you explain to them that you're a knight you're after the enchantress and they're like oh sounds like a rad mission man well maybe we can help you out if you can beat us so you actually have to fight the battle toads in these own weird ways okay which is super cool and it's not easy you have to do the sewer like part where you're racing the other guy and you can't crash i died a hundred times on that one but if you beat the battle toads they give you an armor set which is super helpful in the game and the whole time this is going on i'm completely geeking out i've got just this stupid grin on my face because what game made in 2014 as a throwback to old school Nintendo games is going to pay homage to something like the Battletoads in the game.

It was just an amazing, it really just tickled me, dude. I thought it was an amazing touch. I was just like, dude, kudos to these developers for this. Way to honor your source material and stuff like that. I just, I thought it was super cool. What's funny is, did you know that it's a different fight? If you play it on PlayStation, it's not the battle toads. You fight Kratos from God of War. Yeah. So it's actually a little bit of like an exclusive depending depending on what you play it on, the bosses can change a little bit. That is awesome, man. How funny is that? I wonder what kind of armor Kratos gives you. Does it give you the blades of chaos? I doubt it. Because you and I both played this on PC. So on PC and Xbox, you get Battletoads. But yeah, PlayStation, I read online, you get Kratos, which is pretty cool.

That's the flavor that's built into this game. And it's one of those things, it's hard to kind of visualize a platformer and what's going on with this from us talking about it and stuff. But that should tell you kind of the love that the developer had, the trying to be true to the nature of the game that they were trying to make and the overall goal of the game and the flavor of it and how it plays and stuff like that, to have this hidden sequence in there, I just thought was just such a good touch. Yeah, it really is. All right. Well, we're definitely running short on time. So we did

promise to talk about the additional campaigns, so we need to at least mention them. I'll give just a very short description of what they are. One of the additional campaigns is called Plague of Shadows, and that's kind of a neat idea because what they do is the story of that one runs simultaneous with Shovel Knight, but it's from the perspective of Plague Knight. So you play as one of the...

Yeah, you are one of the villains, and you get to see from his perspective what was going on at the same time. So he gets to chuck around his bombs, so the gameplay is actually quite a bit different. You get to collect things like fuses, powders, and kind of like build your own unique bombs. And you get to add different effects, which is pretty neat. There is Specter of Torment, which is actually a prequel, and it goes over how the Enchantress was able to recruit all the various knights. And so Specter Knight does wall running. He does dash and slash combos, which is kind of neat. King of Cards is kind of bananas

because it's a prequel to everything, and you play as King Knight working your way through a tournament to earn the title King of Cards, but you actually play a card game called Joustice and you spend the gold that you earn on buying cards for this deck. But you can also play all of King of Cards, just the platforming elements, and ignore Joustice, but it's actually in there so this is the one game that's a little bit funnier because you get to play as this king knight who's very pompous he also cries to regain health which kind of cracked me up i thought that was very funny and then the last mode is showdown which honestly is like a four-man smash brothers using the shovel knight characters and if you do the one player mode it's exactly like mortal combat it just it literally scrolls vertically through all

the enemies and you start at the bottom you beat them you go to the next one so it's kind of like a mortal combat tournament and you can choose to buy all of these separately or you can buy the treasure trove which is the all-in-one. And we might talk a little bit about that here as we get into the next segments. So Josh, you've got some community reviews to read for us? I do have reviews. As we do in all of our deep dives, you guys heard us talk about the game. We kind of break down as much as we can in the timeframe that we have. But hey, we're two old guys just chatting games. Maybe sometimes we don't feel a certain way about a game. So we always like to read some reviews from the Steam community. We always try to get a couple of good ones and a

couple of bad ones to just give an overall idea of what other people think about it. So this first one, and I always like to say how much time people had in the game because steam tells you that and that kind of gives you an idea too i mean we had one guy that gave a game like a negative review and he had like 0.1 hours on record so you know so this first one is recommended 16 hours on record and they say this is the best megaman game ever made. That goes back to the beginning where this definitely has a Mega Man flavor with the bosses and the unique kind of personalities of the bosses. And sometimes you get abilities from them and stuff like that as well. It's not quite Mega Man. You're not going to get like a leaf shield because you beat Leaf Man and stuff like that. But there's definitely

that vein is certainly there. That one made me chuckle, though, because apparently we're not the only ones that thought that it was heavily flavored towards Mega Man. All right. So this next one is not recommended. This person has five and a half hours on record. Is this a game or is it a torture device? Imagine a game almost as difficult as Dark Souls, but you have no freedom and no story to enjoy. The gameplay is stiff and frustrating, while the humor is juvenile. I played through half the game and it was indeed a challenge, but not particularly fun for me. But apparently a lot of people love it. That's an interesting review because I did not find this game to be very difficult. Certainly nowhere near Dark Souls. That's wild to me to

compare it to Dark Souls. Don't get me wrong. There's a couple levels where I came close to raging. They were few and far between, to be honest with you. The Dark level kind of ticked me off because that was just evil. Kudos to you. And then the Air level took me a little while to kind of wrap my brain around the timing on that one. I think I died more on that level. With all the wind. Yeah. I died more on that level than any others. But I didn't find this game to be frustrating. You know, I didn't think the difficulty level was that off the charts. Like, maybe we're old school. So we're used to those kind of difficulty levels and platformers like,

I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, there were a couple times where I was like, oh, I died again, and I would be kind of mad. But then you would usually beat it within one or two more attempts. I would quickly forget that little frustration. That's kind of how platformers work, right? You get stuck at a certain part and then you finally beat it and now you're having fun again. So I didn't think it was that tough.

Or you can't get past a part. You die eight times. You stop. You get up. You go to get a drink, whatever. You turn the game off for 10, 15 minutes. You come back and you beat it the very first attempt. I don't know what it is, man. Yes. I don't know what it is, but just sometimes taking that little break matters. Okay. This next one is not recommended. Seven hours on record. This is

probably one of the most overrated games I've played in a long time, and I honestly don't see how anyone can enjoy it. The difficulty is decent and the thematic side of the game is good, which is probably why people like this game. But if you actually care about gameplay, you're getting completely ripped off. I agree with one thing that he said there. The music is very, very good. It is. In platformers, music matters because you're going to hear that song on repeat, and it better be good enough and enjoyable enough that it's not gonna grind on your nerves. And I really enjoyed the music in this one. I was not surprised to see that one of the composers of Mega Man wrote a couple of songs

for Shovel Knight. Really? Because I actually thought the music was very Mega Man-ish as well, in a good way. The music is so good in this game. It is so true to the genre and the age and what they're going for with the throwback and stuff as well. But I was a big fan of it. And it's like you said, the music sets the tone for the different levels. And so I thought it really, really complemented the game as well. The one thing I agreed with on this review is that the items don't really matter. We kind of already touched on that. But you get one or two things and that's it. There's probably 10, 15 different relics that you can get, but they just don't really matter.

And you can spend a ton of time and money trying to amass more of them, but it's just kind of pointless at that point. All right, last review. This one is recommended. 15 hours on record. I lost all my money by jumping off a cliff, trying to grab the money I dropped when I died. I could have written that one because that was me, man. I was so, I got so butthurt if I couldn't get my money bags back. That guy needed the fishing rod, just like you did. All right, Paul.

Oh, that's funny. So that's what the community thinks. Now we try to guess what the overall score is for the cumulative reviews for this game. Steam does an overall review score on a scale of 1 to 100 to say, hey, this is where this game ranks from all the reviews that people gave it. I think you won for the second time in a row last time. I did. Yeah. So does that mean I get to go first with my guess? No, I don't think so. Well, actually, yes, you do go first because I want to be able to play this one above you or one below you game. I was going to say, I'm guessing you already wrote your answer down,

but I'll allow you to move it as long as it doesn't change the winner. I know that this is a very beloved series. Even though I did not play it, the word was always out. I think with platformer games like this, they tend to do really well because it pulls in casual gamers.

I'm going to say this one's super high. I'm going to go 95%. All right. That's pretty high. I thought that this game was a lot of fun. I thought that people would, for the most part, enjoy it. It is a platformer, which I'm not sure... I mean, platformers when we were kids were all the rage. But I did think like, man, platformers, maybe they've fallen out of the limelight a little bit. I don't know that they're as popular with the younger crowd these days. I did know that this game was very widely recognized and known. So I wanted to give

it a high score. I didn't go quite as high as you. I said 90%. I feel like there is a lot to like about this game, but it's still a platformer, which isn't everybody's genre so i said 90 the actual paul is 80 no i'm just kidding it's 96 paul overwhelmingly positive you missed it by one buddy 96 huh wow yeah as soon as you started saying 80 i was like are you sure wait are you cheating paul I just would have been shocked. I would have said, I don't know that that makes sense. You can always tell when a game is made by people who love video games. And I feel like that always comes through.

And you can feel it here. This is coming from a group of people who love video games. And so they're creating it based on nostalgia. Come on, you're mashing Mario and Mega Man and Zelda. How is this not going to make a good, well-received game? That was at least my thought. You mentioned those three games. Those are iconic, just beloved games. And you used all three of those as inspiration and did a very good job with it. And so, I mean, kudos to them. I'm super happy that people love this game as much as they do.

I see why it is, you know, I don't want to say a cult classic because usually those are not popular at first and then become popular. But I agree with the rating on it, to be honest. Now, most of the negative reviews, to be fair, complained about the difficulty level. Interesting. Okay. I mean, I don't know. Maybe we're old and grizzled and it doesn't bother us or something, but maybe people just

aren't used to difficult platformers either. I guess when you have games like, I don't know, it's been a long time since I played the Ori games, but those seemed very easy. So yeah, maybe it's just people who expect an easier platformer and then they're just a little surprised maybe that's what it comes down to yeah all right okay so you you what you went on your huge win streak where you won like four in a row i guess this is now three in a row for me i'm cheating next time i i believe it all right should we uh should we hit that music? Go into the next segment?

Let me just play it live, Paul. Hey there, Enchantress. Well, here I am. What are your other two wishes? All right. So cheesy pickup line aside, this segment we call Make Love, Marry, or Murder. That's our family-friendly way of deciding how to rate this game.

Are you going to make love to it? Is it fun short-term, but you can't really commit long-term? Is it marriage material, or are you better off just murdering it? This is kind of an interesting one, because we both picked up the treasure trove. I don't remember how much we paid, but I do know that we bought it on a third-party site and it was quite cheap. It was like $7 a piece.

Okay. For $7, I would say it's a must-buy. I would say if you're paying full price, because this game normally goes for $40, I would not spend $40 on this. I would buy just the base game, and I think you're going to squeeze 90% of the fun out of it. I think there are fun things in the other installments, but when I was done with Shovel of Hope, I only dabbled in all of the others. I did not finish any of them. So I would say it's definitely, it's like a must buy but it's still a make love game because

you can beat the base game i would say in about five maybe six hours at the most yeah but it's it's still a very fun five to six hours so even though saying make love might sound weird i would still say it's a must buy i had not played a platformer to be honest since i think cuphead before we play and it's very very different um i am super glad that ace picked this game because i forgot how much i enjoy that genre from time to time and it's just when i'm browsing steam and i've got like this itch to play something new, I just don't go to platformers for whatever reason. And I grew up on platformers. Maybe that's why. Maybe it's like, I played enough of these as a kid. I want something new and 2021-ish. It's just one of

those things where I don't really think about it. But playing this game brought back so much nostalgia for me. It was a lot of fun. I'm with you in that I didn't really play much of the DLC content. I had an absolute blast playing Shovel of Hope. I did dabble in the other ones. I'll be honest, I did not like them nearly as much. Maybe it was just that, hey, I've played this now. I've gotten my platformer fix, and Shovel of Hope was so good that the others just seemed slightly just... It was the same game. Diminishing returns.

Yeah, it was the same game. It was just a different character with slightly different moves. But the map was the same. The bosses were the same. I mean, I get that it wasn't the same, but it was the same. And so I lost interest in the DLC very, very quickly. But for me, Shovel of Hope was a phenomenal game. I'm going to say make love to it because you don't... How do you marry a platformer? Do you know what I mean? Well, see, I think you sometimes can.

I have, over the course of my entire life,'ve probably played mario 3 for 10 000 hours and i still love playing mario 3 i know where every single hidden brick box is i know where all the whistles are and i still love playing it and i i don't quite have that feeling on this one so it's funny you say that because i actually wrote down that I would say the platformers that are two dimensional that I would marry are Celeste, Mario 3, Mega Man 2, Rayman Legends. And if you consider Castlevania Symphony of the Night as aers. So I have it above things like Super Meat Boy, Crash Bandicoot, Donkey Kong Country. I know some people really love that game. So I have it at the very top of the make love tier, if that makes sense. I'll be honest. I agree with you completely.

There are certain platformers. I've not played Celeste. Apparently, I have to play that game because that's one of the most well-respected platformers ever made, I guess. It's so good. Yeah. I mean, that's what I hear too. I got to try it at some point. I'm with you 100%. This is not a slam against Shovel Knight by any means. It's just a little bit shorter. The DLC to me doesn't really add a whole lot to it. I had an absolute blast playing this. So don't take my lack of seeing Mary to this in any sort of negative way. It's just, it's a shorter platformer. It's five to six hours. I think you hit the nail on the head right there. It's a lot of fun. The

difficulty level is perfect. There's tons to enjoy. But when the game was over, I was just kind of like, that was super fun. And now I'm done. I didn't have a lot of incentive to do the DLC stuff. I didn't have any incentive to go back through and try to find maybe some stuff or new relics or anything like that. And so I think it's a phenomenal game. I think it's super, super fun. I would never in a million years pay $40 for this. But I feel like the base game on Steam now is like $15 maybe,

somewhere around there. Yeah, it's $15. Yeah. And and i feel like for 15 like this is a no-brainer if you like platformers then absolutely pick this game up because there's a lot to like about it i just can't say it's a mary because it's it's a platformer yeah i was actually kind of shocked to see how short it was, because it's like in Mario 3, you've got your, you know, World 1, you go through your eight levels, and you beat the final level, and then you go on to World 2. Well, Shovel Knight is just one world, and it's got like, I don't know, 12 levels, and then the game just kind of ends. So, I was almost a little surprised i assumed it would be longer and i don't think it's a bad thing that it's shorter i think it was just

kind of the perfect length where you got to get max enjoyment it didn't grow stale and then it just kind of ended but that's okay i think that's a good thing it ended when it needed to to be honest with you like games do not need to be drug out longer than they need to. And they knew to cut this off right when they needed to, like they did everything very, very well with it. All right, well, let's go to the leaderboard, see where this game stacks up. All right. If anyone out there is new to the show, the leaderboard segment is where Josh and I take a look at every single game that we have done a deep dive episode on and determine where this one ranks. So we've got a total of 58 games now on our leaderboard.

Just to give you a couple of games here, just to give you a little bit of an idea of what's where.'ve got overwatch at number one we've got satisfactory at six we have the forgotten city at 17 we have outer wilds at 29 trying to give josh a heart attack because he would love that to be higher uh we've got phasmophobia at 41 fall Fall Guys at 50, Sea of Thieves at 56. And we have to agree as a consensus where we want to place Shovel Knight. I know where this is in my mind, Paul. I've got a range. Okay, tell me.

Because I honestly, I'm not really too sure. What range are you thinking? I'm mid-20s on this one. That's a little high. I'm a little surprised. I thought coming into this episode, I would be higher on this game than you, but I think we're actually pretty close to being on the same page. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to enjoy. It is a memorable game. I'm not gushing about it. You know what I mean? I get why some people... I get 100% why Ace loves

this game. The comedy in it, the characters... it was like this game is the perfect example of a labor of love. It's like you said, you can tell this game was made by people that were gamers, that love these kinds of games and went, you know what? We can probably make a game that's great. And they did. 100% they did. And so this is one of those things where I want to give them credit. At the end of the day, for me, it's a perfectly fun game. It's not like super amazing, in my opinion. I think it's well worth playing. I'm glad I played it, but it's not like so amazing that I think it's like a top 10 type of game for us either. So for me, I'm looking at our leaderboard and it's like, I see Far Cry 5, Killing Floor 2, No Man's Sky, Raft, Warhammer Vermintide 2, all in the mid-20s area. And I kind of go, that's about the level of fun that I had with this. That's not a negative by any means, you know what I mean? But for me, it kind of fits in that range so what do you think yeah i'm right with you that's actually quite high because you figure we've covered 58 games you and i love gaming in general we're gonna tend to like games so honestly as long

as you're not like bottom 15 it really means we actually like it quite right yeah uh i would not put this one above no man's sky stardew Far Cry 5, but I would be fine putting it anywhere in the late 20s. So if you wanted to go anywhere 26, 27, 28, 29, I think those are all more than fair. I really don't like you, Paul. Is it because it's going to push Outer Wilds into 30? I'm looking at these and I go, Killing Floor 2 was a lot of fun, but I could see putting Hollow Knight right where that's at. Raft, I honestly had a blast playing Raft.

What did I say? You said Hollow Knight. Oh, did I? See? There you go. Shovel Knight. Raft was a lot of fun, but I could see putting Shovel Knight where Raft is. Vermintide 2, super fun four-player co-op, but I could see putting Sho night where raft is vermin tide 2 super fun four player co-op but i could see putting shovel night there as well but then lo and behold what do i i

see down at 29 one of my favorite games ever outer wilds and then i go so wait a minute i'm putting shovel night above outer wilds it's a travesty this is exactly how i feel with uh rim world which by the way has somehow dropped to 34 when in when in my personal list it would probably be like top six let's so i would say 26 27 or 28 i feel is perfect i could kind of go i i liked i think i liked killing floor to just a tad more which is very funny because both of these games were chosen by legendary supporters i think i would put this one one below killing floor and i would put it 27 all right done i think i think like i said anywhere in there i think is i just perfect for it done we'll lock it in so so top half of our games, you said 58. So this is in the upper 50%. It is. Yeah. It's in the top half, which is even more impressive than that might sound.

All right. Well, perfect. So we're done with Shovel Knight. We had a blast. We have jumped into the next deep dive game, which has not yet been been announced but it is chosen by another legendary supporter uh this one was chosen by t-fols and he has not announced it yet has he i do i do not think he has i don't think so no i have been playing it and it is pretty cool i like so far so good in my opinion i'll give a little bit of a hint i have really really been enjoying the hillbilly and I'll just say that some people might be able to pick it out from that hint there but thank you to everyone for listening you know if you like what we do here

which you must if you've been sticking with us here for 80 minutes but please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts it's only a couple bucks a month you can also do it on Patreon by going to MultiplayerSquad.com and that'll forward to our Patreon page. For just a couple bucks a month,

it will help fund our show and it'll also give you access to all of our quick takes that we have recorded before. There are over 40 of them, so you'll get access to extra episodes that Josh and I record separately. And also come check us out on Discord.

There is a link in the episode description. That is completely free. And we would love to be able to have you in our Discord community as well. Yeah, it's an awesome community. We say it all the time. It's just it's one of those things where people show up and then they go, this is like no other gaming community that I've been a part of. Everybody is super friendly.

They just love talking. There's no a part of. Everybody is super friendly. They just love talking. There's no toxicity at all. It's family friendly. So if you're younger and you're like, hey, I don't know, it is family friendly. We keep it that way. It's just an awesome place to hang out with other gamers and just chat about anything gaming, food, whatever. All this stuff comes up that people love talking about.

We fixed computers over Discord. I mean, it's just great. But everybody's really just willing to pitch in and help each other out, which is awesome. Yeah. So that's it here for today. We'll be back on Thursday with a half hour This Week in Gaming episode. Happy gaming until then. Happy Halloween,

everyone. This will have come out, I think, on Halloween. No, the day after. Is so the day after is it the day after uh yep you're right it's early access which you get if you subscribe on patreon so enjoy all of that candy and we'll see you guys on thursday all right see you everybody