Roguelikes, after a decade of genre popularity increasing exponentially since the beginning of the 2010s with Isaac, Spelunky HD, and their ilk iterating and reiterating on various formulas of games previous thought to be necessarily designed within curves of play pacing and encounter editing, are no longer in the position of being possibly considered a fad genre. Other game genres, obviously less broad in their label (because really, roguelikes are linked by a mechanical binary state similarity rather than a generic coalition of traits, rather being decided as ‘roguelike’ depending on their lean in proc gen vs static design) with more intermingled and necessary signifiers of their family, that rose and fell alongside the roguelike have been evaluated with historical lenses that themselves are being re-evaluated; the roguelike, in comparison, still feels, despite being a genre that has had tentpole articles representing its type for more than 2 decades, as though it is in a stage of cultural gestation. Despite the deluge of titles released, academic inquiries published, and players hermited, the genre remains relatively untapped and under populated with all-time greats in both its game catalogue and its methodological concerns towards strong art statements. For me, one of the concerns foremost in obviousness of what is missing in both representation of greatness and methodology, is the equitable branching from tutorializing to incrementing game state. In practice, this would look like the point or area in which the game decidedly stops presenting new mechanics or contexts for its mechanics and instead begins to mete out the rewards of using those mechanics for the sake of expression, largely because systems mastery is the only metric of intrinsic progress within the actual play of most roguelikes. Spelunky is probably the only truly good example of this paid out in roguelikes, and this is likely due to its being, comparatively, extraordinarily spartan in its systems breadth yet hugely plungeable in depth (as well as Derek Yu being a genius, but who counts that these days). Even massive, indisputably influential and masterful examples of the genre, such as Slay the Spire or Isaac, fail to adequately demarcate where the player can expect the knowledge of mechanics to be funnelled into intra-systemic rewards or progress. It is not unusual to see reviews for any given roguelike stating something along the lines of, ‘it was too hard and after bashing my head against the wall, I gave up because I didn’t/couldn't do what I was asked and the game didn’t give me what I needed to progress’. Sometimes this is true and sometimes it isn’t but what matters is: if it feels like it’s true, it doesn’t matter if it’s true. The game can’t expect you to watch it change around you when it won’t help you change alongside it.

In Shovel Knight Dig, during my ~10 hours with it, I had several different moments of pause with each mechanic wherein I asked, “when should this become fun?” The answer, unfortunately dually because the production of the game is quite lovely external to its being interactive and because Yacht Club are a studio whose reliability with platforming and encounter design is remarkable regardless of what scale and budget you compare them to, was for me, never. This may be due to the fact that the digging, jumping, slashing, visiting town, catching items and upgrades, exploring, etc. are all poorly implemented and misaligned with each other (which is mostly true in the latter, and mostly conjecture in the former), but it is my read that the game was abandoned to the gulf between tutorializing and incrementing too early in development and is now stuck in a limbo of systems alienness without means of evolving it mechanically, evaluating it strategically, or intrinsically deriving any pleasure singularly from its presented actions. The town is woefully under equipped to make the meta progress worth caring about and the dungeons are gratuitous in their inability to conceptualise an excitement of play possibility that would feed into any town growth, if that was even a remote possibility. The upgrade variety ranges from necessary to useless, much like this year’s Dome Keeper, and because the entirety of Dig’s meaningful play occurs in the dungeon, it is almost unavoidable that you will find yourself 25 minutes into nearly every run realising that is doomed to failure, and that getting to that failure was horribly unfun (not that fun really factors into it: basically the highest state of euphoria in the game is diverting). The writing is fluff in a way that does not charm with the same care of anything in Treasure Trove; the ecology of the world doesn’t allow for characters in the way a curated play experience does (there is a reason why many roguelike players refer to high level play in their chosen games as ‘an exciting excel sheet’). If there is any overarching reason to the world and what Shovel Knight is doing in this stage of his saga, the game doesn’t allow the player to care nor does it care enough to expatriate itself to the rigours of play made by roguelikes as iterative story generators.

It hurts to see the first real commercial product from Yacht Club since they released Shovel Knight fail to this degree, especially since each campaign added for free onto that original game would be a GOTY contender in its own right had it been paid product, but Dig is not only bad, it’s obviously bad in a way that will be usable as case study for the genre.