Shovel Knight – Digging the Rhythm
Anyone out there who has ever spent any amount of time in Shovel Knight will know exactly where this is coming from. Early on in Yacht Club Games’ love letter to a gaming era gone by, the titular knight meets a Bard. He stands around in the village and offers our earth-moving hero the opportunity of a life time; bring the Bard music sheets and you shall be rewarded. Shovel Knight’s music was also frankly an awesome addition to the game. Perhaps even enough of one to warrant a title all to itself.
Lift up the formula used in Theatrhythm or even in the oft-forgotten Harmoknight and slot it into the Shovel Knight mythos. Come to think of it, that does sound pretty simple and could even be done with assets already found in the game. With 46 different sheets of music and 8 members in the Order of No Quarter, you could even make a standalone experience that still gives players that Shovel Knight injection without it playing like its parent title. Create levels where you have to jump, dig, or cast in time with the music across four pieces of music, then slam a boss fight into a fifth.
This leaves a couple of tracks out in the wild, granted, but extend some of the later bosses like King Knight into two long song fights and there could actually be something here.
Of course we aren’t talking about the possibility of something like Rock Band here because that’d just be too far. The key to a good spin off is to keep around much of what players love while changing up the gameplay enough to make it something special all by itself.
Hell maybe you could go absolutely crazy in spin-off mode and have the rhythm version of Shovel Knight chart the Bard’s very own quest to collect all of the music sheets. Right at the very end, the sheets are lost in some utterly mundane fashion before, moments later, Shovel Knight himself shows up and the game slots into the universe perfectly.
