Despite being easily the shortest installment of Shovel Knight, this one is probably my favorite. Specter Knight is super fun to play as, and his playstyle can allow for some seriously crazy parkour scenarios and level exploits. The level design is top-notch as well, and it makes all of the locations established in Shovel of Hope feel much more alive and bustling than in that game. I also really liked the boss fights in this game. Granted, most of them are just the same characters as in Shovel of Hope, but most of them receive new tricks and attacks to make them harder for Specter Knight (For the most part. I'd argue Propellor Knight, Plague Knight, and Polar Knight are significantly easier as Specter Knight). The soundtrack is a banger per usual, and we got so many excellent remixes of the songs from Shovel of Hope. And one last thing I'd like to praise is the story. It's surprisingly dark and even kinda depressing at times, but it's pretty engaging and the darker tone really fits, seeing as our main protagonist is an undead slave and this game is a prequel to Shovel of Hope and Plague of Shadows, showing us how the Enchantress and the Order of No Quarter rose to power.

The game is not without issues though. Specter Knight will like to cling to walls even if you don't want him too, the stages where you get to test out the powerups are way shorter compared to Shovel of Hope and Plague of Shadows' stages of a similar nature, the concept of upgrading your powerups is neat but makes the game a bit too grindy, and that minigame in the Tower of Fate does not give you enough rewards for how brutal it is. But overall, I really liked Specter of Fate, and it's easily my favorite Shovel Knight installment.

When the Switch launched 4 years ago near this day, I wasn't the most excited to play Breath of the Wild as everyone else. Despite owning the game on 3DS already, I bought Shovel Knight on Switch again on LAUNCH DAY just so I could play Specter of Torment as soon as possible. I was still in my days of being obsessed with Shovel Knight, having played the original game back when I was only 13. I obsessed over the game and its world, and even with the issues I had with Plague of Shadows, I remained infatuated with the game. There was just something about this world, this aesthetic, this cast of characters that I loved seeing, and wanted to know so much more about. In that sense, it almost feels as if Specter of Torment was made specifically for me. As if they made a game just to make me happy.

Only 3 years seperate the releases of the base game and the Specter of Torment campaign, and yet it was enough to invoke such powerful nostalgic feelings for me at 16. Beyond me being the perfect person for the game, it feels as if I was also the perfect age to play it. So while I'm going to delve into the gameplay and the feelings I have on it, I cannot stress enough just how absolutely blindingly perfect the game is in its presentation from that perspective. The music, visuals, world, and story, all clicks into place so utterly perfectly. But its more than just nailing that execution: It isnt just great music, great locations, great writing, all of that on its own. Its that all of those elements were made to build off of that original game from 2014. That each part of the aesthetic is made as a love-letter to it. Take Lost City: A level with decent music and a generic look, is suddenly contexualized into this greater world. You get to see the icy plains outside, with music hitting an emotional, narrative chord. And it clicks into place due to the familiarity you had with the original.

Everything just...clicks. It feels like the game Shovel Knight should have been, and yet its elevated so much higher due to how much the game's presentation and story mines from the player's familiarity with what they're seeing. Its a near-perfect execution of a prequel game. Its thus really heartbreaking to me that, just like the original Shovel Knight, the challenge of the base game has almost entirely disappeared for me and I no longer find the basic movement fun enough. Note the wording and caveats here, because I'll get back to them. Like Classic Mega Man you move with a sort of rigidity and a fixed speed, lacking the fluidity and self-expression of a game like Mega Man X, Zero, Hollow Knight, etc. The game is undoubtedly more satisfying to play than Shovel of Hope due to the new moves that ARE here, but it almost feels like a game thats chained to the original game, an ironic tradeoff for how much it gains from that deal in terms of presentation. The game is still rigidly divided up into screens, with a controlled pace, and the "intended way" to play always so glaringly obvious.

That untapped potential can almost be tapped into, however, with the Rail Mail armor upgrade. Giving you a core new movement option that ups the pace and expressiveness of the game, it in a way transforms it into something far closer to my ideal kind of 2D platformer. Combining this with playing the game on New Game+, which balances out the special weapon lineup far more and encourages a brisk, aggressive playstyle, leads to something magical. Its strange: "the game I wish this could've been" is just unlockable within the game itself. Even with this, there are just too many restrictions still in place. Enemies are still far too simple and unaggressive, the per-screen structure still halts the pace, and the game overall still isn't difficult enough due to not having enough depth to its mechanics to challenge.

In the end, what I have here is a game that is absolutely magical to me, that I can ALMOST turn into the game that I want it to be, yet is shackled by its predecessor to keep so many elements that just dont align with my philosophies for 2D Action games. Its able to ride so hard on the enchanting presentation, pacing, and the side-options that nudge it closer to my tastes, that it still sits among my all-time favorites. Yet I'm always going to wish it could've been unrestrained.

[Playtime: 50 Hours]
[Keyword: Bittersweet]

1 - This is gonna be a long one.
2 - This review has no story spoilers.
3 - I recommend reading my analysis of the Shovel Knight's base game first.

After finishing Shovel Knight (SK from now on), I gave this one a try, seeing as it is common opinion that Specter of Torment (SoT from now on) is better than the base game itself. Because of that, I came with high expectations about this experience and I gotta say: I found it somewhat disappointing.
I do think I understand where the mainstream opinion comes from, so I'm gonna talk first about what seems to be the ways that SoT seems to be better then SK and I'm gonna try and explain why I don't really feel that to be the case. I do concede before starting two things: that the overall themes and aesthetics are more authentic and focused than the original, that feels basic and more dependent on nostalgia in comparison. And that the history of SoT is undisputedly more evolved. It just has way more to it than the serviceable story and of SK but it's really nothing to sing home to outside of the 'retrogamer' niche, so I'm not gonna talk about it. It also has some nice elements that are best left unspoiled.
Movement and combat, the two main cornerstones of this game, are faster, more fluid and more rensposive. Those are not necessarily good things, but I think that instinctively everyone enjoys being more in control of your own character at first, even if that is not in unity with the rest of the game's design. It just feels better by example to be able to mash the attack button and get an actual corresponding speed to your inputs instead of the slow animations of Shovel Knight. In general, you feel much more in control this time around, being able to run faster, wall run, wall jump and even move around in the air using the dash attack mechanic on enemies and props. In theory it gives the developers a lot more room to create plataforming and combat challenges and gives the player more ways to think about how to act given a certain situation.
There is also more inventive items this time around, which grants a lot of newer and more exciting possibilites in gameplay when you contrast SoT with SK. I mainly used Will Skull because who doesn't like Estus Flasks(?) and the Hover Plume for being able to cheat some plataforming segments and even sometimes gather gold I lost. There is also a new selection of armors, I really only used the one that diminishes your health but makes your attack more powerful, the other did not seemed interesting. You can also upgrade your magic items by paying the same gold you use to buy armors, which brings a theoretically nice element of player choice.
My problem with the way Specter plays is that the fact that he's fast feels more like a feel-good cop-out decision from the devs to appease player criticism than a thoughtfully implemented mechanical change that brings new and challenging situations to the table. Like I said, it feels good to be able to attack fast, but when most enemies die in two or even one hit, it kind of destroys the careful balance of the game that in many ways is still designed around SK. It's just easy to get hit, mash the attack button and kill everything around you with no effort, especially with the right armor upgrade.
The dash-attack mechanic is also something that at first felt really good and made me excited about the game would offer, but it quickly became that I'd mostly just press the attack button in a straight pattern until enemies died, something especially common in sub-boss encounters at the middle of the levels.
On the subject of magic items, the problem is now two-fold: Not only most of the magical items are superfluous, two of them are actually overpowered. Those are the ones I previously mentioned, the Will Skull and the Hover Plume. The problem with the Will Skull is that it just heals too much for how much magic you get - you get a few points every time you kill something regardless if it's the first or not and it's common to come across little refils on the floor. Either It should replenish less health or you should receive less darkness overall, and I tend towards the last one because I believe the Hover Plume also feels way less expensive than it should, considering it's basically a way to cheat out plataforming abilities that would otherwise prove challenging.
At first I thought the armor set that gives you more damage but takes out your health was going to make the game more challenging, but it actually makes it easier for you to play dumb because it's so easy to regenerate health. The only way to make the game actually challenging overall is to break all the checkpoints for cash, but I always afforded all upgrades to magic items and had no interest in playing with other types of armor. I also feel that breaking all of the checkpoints makes the game way too hard, so it's either very easy or too hard for me to feel motivated to play.
On the plataforming side of things, the feeling that the game has many more ways to move around excited my imagination and made me wonder the ways which the game was gonna ramp up it's difficulty, but I found that outside here and there it never really does anything too hard with the plataforming. It shows all of it's tricks very early and doesn't really develops from them, which is a shame. I only felt really challenged in the elevator mini-game and some segments in later levels. And again the last level is not really that much of a climax in terms either combat or plataforming.

Overall, Specter of Torment brings a lot of new ideas to the table but some of them don't really mash together well and the game suffers for it. Every time something new appeared I felt that it would lead to more well developed places than the game actually took me. I'm not sure it is any better than the more concise design of Shovel Knight, even though the story certainly is more rich. One step forward, one step back.

I can definitely see why this is many people's favorite Shovel Knight campaign. It's easily the most streamlined: it eliminates Shovel Knight's map and encounters, and simplifies the hub to a single location while keeping all the character found in these locations in the other games; it's not standing alongside Joustus or weapon management like King and Plague Knights' campaigns.

Specter Knight's kit manages to make for interesting, unique platforming that demands the player think about their positioning and how it impacts their movement options constantly. The stages are built near perfectly for his moveset, being challenging without ever being tedious in the way I found some moments in Plague Knight's run to be. Every stage is reasonably fair and approachable for Specter Knight at any point of the game...

...But I think that does make it a little flat, too. There's not as much of a difficulty curve in Specter of Torment as there is in the other games, and honestly, it almost feels too easy, between the main stages and the true final boss. I liked getting wrecked by Cardia and gradually getting the hang of Joustus in King of Cards, and just barely surviving my first bout against the final boss in Plague of Shadows - and I think this game doesn't have enough of those kinds of moments.

It's consistent, and compelling. The story's engaging (although it makes me wonder if Reize's creator bankrolled Yacht Club for it) and shows a gradual decline in redeemability for each of the Shovel Knight protagonists; I liked getting to see Shield Knight in her prime, although I think Yacht Club are better at making a plot than they are at telling a story, and the presentation suffers for it.

It's very, very polished, and very, very solid, but I don't know if I love it the way I love the other three Shovel Knight games. It's easily one of the best platformers I've played, right?

So why don't I find it as dear to my heart as the rest?

This is BY FAR the best game in Treasure Trove, and that's saying something when given just how good the other games in this package are. I beat and really loved Shovel of Hope and King of Cards, but Specter of Torment was the one that really captivated me.

Specter Knight has always had the sickest design out of all the knights in my opinion, and his moveset is so much fun to use in this game. Every attack feels satisfying to hit, and crossing huge gaps using just your aerial attack to gain height and distance feels amazing. Specter's aerial attack is the best part of his kit, and having this attack that not only lets you attack the enemy but also adds to your movement are just great (and are generally great in most games that have them), and allow for some amazing level design. Going through levels is a blast and makes you feel like a legend for getting over obstacles and using your kit to its fullest.

The soundtrack and story are also superb. Pretty much every track in this game is a remix of the original Shovel Knight's stage themes, and I think I like these versions better. Being a prequel to Shovel of Hope, the stages are older and some of them are pretty different because of this. Thus, the music was changed/remixed in order to capture the new feelings of these levels. I think the best example is the clock tower, tinker knight's stage. When Shovel Knight goes through it, the music is more menacing and makes you feel like you're going through an evil fortress. However, when Specter Knight goes through the stage Tinker Knight hasn't joined the Order of No Quarter yet, so the music is upbeat and inspirational since Tinker Knight is just an engineer and not really a bad guy at this point. The story is also the best of all the games in Treasure Trove, and I think most would agree. It's hard to talk too much about it without spoiling it, but it's a bit more complex and interesting than the simple damsel in distress type stories of the other games.

As for the collectibles in this game, it's one of the few games I don't remember having to google the location of a single one of them. They're not the hardest to find, but I much prefer easier collectibles than impossibly hard ones. I personally didn't like too many of them, but some of them are pretty cool and are worth giving a shot.

If Treasure Trove was just this game, I'd think it was a steal. Again, this game captivated me in every aspect from beginning to end, and my only true complaint with it is that I wish it kept on going.