In the Secret Fountain levels, I fell in love with the water. I didn’t notice it at first. I was just digging downwards, flattening baddies with my shovel, enjoying the regular knockabout fun of a 2D platformer. But then I started getting hit by fish. Quite a lot of fish. Fish from the fish cannon, scarlet and slappy and properly doing me in. I realised that the fish moved across the water – they could travel wherever it flowed. And I realised that I could break blocks and channel the water where I wanted it to go. Maybe I could do more than just reroute the fish? What would happen if I steered the water over to that promising waterwheel?
Shovel Knight Dig is a fresh spin on the Shovel Knight series of Duck Tales-inspired platformers. Like Shovel Knight: Pocket Dungeon, it’s sort of a sidestory. Pocket Dungeon turned the action-heavy core of the games into a block puzzler. Dig initially seems like a blend of Mr Driller and Downwell. You dig down through soil and rock, collecting gems, fighting baddies, travelling through themed worlds. Classic Driller/Downwell stuff. Thing is, it doesn’t feel like either game,
That’s because while Dig is a Shovel Knight game and a Yacht Club game, it’s also a Nitrome game – it’s a true collaboration. And here a little history is unavoidable. Nitrome is an English micro-studio founded in the early 2000s, and I first encountered the team’s stuff during the Flash/web-game boom in the years that followed. Nitrome was hard to miss: it delivered games that had a pixelart hard candy exterior – lots of hot pinks and mustards and purples. More importantly its games were marked by wild invention and polish.
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