Shovel Knight: King of Cards preview – Royal rush

 We got a chance to preview Shovel Knight’s next and final campaign, King of Cards, and it’s shaping up to be the perfect crown for the collection.

I’ve written about Shovel Knight before, and I can never help but bring up its status as both nostalgia and Kickstarter-done-right, especially in a year of crowdfunding disappointments. Not only was the base game of Shovel Knight stellar, but Yacht Club Games has gone on to fulfill nearly every one of their stretch goals with aplomb. King Knight’s final campaign will crown their quest, and after playing the PAX West version of the game’s demo, I have no reason to believe this royal adventure won’t be able to stand scepter to shovel with the other three adventures. And who would expect it not to?

Playing as King Knight reflects Yacht Club’s skill at adapting gameplay to a character’s personality yet again. As Specter Knight rode rails and zoomed about, phantom-like, so too does King Knight bounce, bash, and twirl his way through his levels with appropriately silly, pompous energy. His primary bash attack propels him forward and bowls over anything in his path, but there’s more to it than just smashing what’s in front of you. By hitting the wall with the bash, King Knight will open into a pirouette that lets him fly even higher or bounce off the heads of enemies ala Shovel Knight’s downward shovel ability. The result? A lot of bouncing, flying and bashing everywhere. In some rooms, I barely touched the ground!

This set-up for King Knight’s abilities allows Yacht Club to play not just with floor platforming design, but with wall placement. Some walls have grass or other coverings on them that prevent King Knight from bashing off of them into a twirl–instead, he just drops. You’ll need to be especially aware of your surroundings to move efficiently through stages of increasing difficulty. In the demo, I played a set of three intro levels that gave me the basic, then was given more health and a big, smashy hammer to deal with three more levels taking place in King Knight and Plague Knight’s aesthetic, respectively. These areas bring back known mechanics, such as Plague Knight’s books and splashing cauldrons, easily marrying them to King Knight’s bouncy style for refreshing takes on the familiar.

Of course, the core sprite art hasn’t changed drastically, though I took special delight in King Knight’s adorable, goofy animations, such as his exit from each level carried by propeller mice and the flouncy swish of his cape. I’m already primed for the full soundtrack of the game to be released so I can jam to “King Knight” renditions of the game’s familiar tunes. The demo only included songs from Specter of Torment and Shovel of Hope, so I’m hoping at least for a King Knight rendition of “Strike the Earth!” or similar.

Yacht Club Games knows how to do a good platformer–they’ve proved that again and again. But King of Cards will test their mettle on another genre entirely: card games. King of Cards is appropriately named beyond just the “king” part. There’s a card game component to the game, though I’m not sure how much of a role it plays in the main story or if it’s just an optional sidequest. As King Knight traipses through levels, he can collect cards for his deck, and then play a special card game with familiar faces in town as he strives to become the titular, “King of Cards.”

The game is simple enough to learn. You’re given a board with a certain amount of spaces to play cards, and one or more gems in the middle. Your goal is to collect more gems than your opponent by having your cards on the gem spaces when the board is full and no more moves can be made. Though you can only play cards on the inner squares without gems on them, you can use your cards to push opponents’ off the board, or push yours into the gem spaces. Arrows on cards can “push back” against other cards trying to push them out. It sounds complex, but in practice, it’s simple enough to learn and fun as hell to think about once the boards get larger and more complex. You can see some of the gameplay in the preview video above.

I feel that much of King of Cards’ appeal will come from how well the card battles are integrated into the platforming gameplay people already love from Yacht Club Games. No matter how good the card games are, if players who are just here to jump around feel that they’re forced to do something they don’t want to do, they might not embrace this installment the same way they did Plague and Specter. On the other hand, balanced rewards for playing and added strategy with unique boards and cards could easily create a whole different type of meta unto itself. Can we get the card game as a standalone mobile game? Please?

Next: Interview with Shovel Knight artist Nick Wozniak: “Sometimes, you’re a fish.”

Shovel Knight: King of Cards will release sometime in 2018 for Wii U, 3DS, Nintendo Switch, PS3, PS4, Vita, Xbox One, PC, Mac, Linux, and Amazon FireTV. That’s a lot of platforms, and we’re not complaining.