Shovel Knight is an action platformer where the player takes control of an 8-bit knight wielding a shovel as a weapon. The player progresses through levels using new techniques and skills found in-game to defeat end-level bosses. Shovel Knight borrows a lot of ideas from classic NES titles like Mario Bros. and DuckTales, but it also introduces an interesting online element.
To add some details on the online portion of the game, Yacht Club Games founder Sean Valesco shared some information with Nintendo:
When you go onto the Wii U version of the game, everywhere that you run through, on the bottom screen, you tap the ‘Digger’s Diary’ button. Then, it’s like a journal that appears and it has different Miiverse messages from different players everywhere.
You can watch the full video below.
This sounds very similar to the way messages from players are left in the constantly unforgivable game, Dark Souls, to aid you in finding secrets and alerting you away from future traps. This is defiantly exciting, considering the title’s only console release is on the 3DS and the Wii U. I feel that those systems need these types of independent titles to satisfy the amount of time between Nintendo’s more popular releases, and I really hope it continues.
Shovel Knight is headed to the Nintendo eShop and to PC on March 31st.