Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon Review (Switch eShop)

Sometimes just before his boss battle, Specter Knight will warn you, “All who play Pocket Dungeon’s deadly game will be consumed by it.” He’s certainly right. Yacht Club’s newest spin-off of its critically lauded Shovel Knight franchise is, in a word, addictive.

It’s easy to look at Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon and think it’s just an interesting, but very skippable sidestep in the series while we wait for the next mainline game. Yet, to pass on this would be to miss out on a tightly designed, highly refined, and refreshingly original take on the falling block puzzler genre. There is more to Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon than you may first think, and we’d say it comfortably meets the wonderfully high-quality standards of Yacht Club’s previous work.

Pocket Dungeon follows a relatively simple narrative wherein the titular knight discovers a magical puzzle cube while out and about. Nearly as soon as he interacts with it, suddenly finds himself being sucked into a pocket dimension within the cube that houses all the knights and characters from the previous games, plus a few interesting newcomers that hint at where the series may go next. Shovel Knight’s task is thus to figure out a way to solve the mysteries of the pocket dungeon and figure out some way to escape with the aid of both his friends and his foes.

To do so you’re expected to overcome a series of progressively more difficult levels, each themed after the iconic stages from the original release and some new locales that feel like they fit perfectly within the aesthetic. Levels present you with an 8×8 grid that slowly fills with enemies and hazards; clear out enough of them will unlock a gateway to the next level and the cycle repeats. On a purely foundational basis, then, this feels very much like the Tetrises and Lumineses that you’ve played before, but the real meat of the game comes in the details.

One key element to consider is that this is primarily a combat-focused game. Keeping the blocks from piling up too high is only a secondary concern, while your main problem is just keeping your playable character alive. Bumping into any enemy or hazard will result in your character dishing out at least one point of damage, and usually taking at least one in return. If any like foes or obstacles are connected to the one you strike, all of them will take equal damage and you’ll be given a chain bonus for eliminating multiple in the same hit. The flipside to dealing damage, however, is that you need to be constantly thinking about how you’re going to top up your health, as it only takes a few hits on any enemy to put you in the danger zone. Potions drop at a reasonably frequent rate, almost always making sure there’s one within reach, but sometimes you may have to go through a few foes to make it to your next bit of healing.

Things are made even more interesting by the fact that there are two speeds at which blocks will fall. Rather like a Mystery Dungeon game, every falling block will move down one cell every time you take a…