![]() Go too fast, however, and you’re prone to make some easy mistakes, which can kill you off almost instantly. The thing is, each tier of the gem meter depletes faster than the last, so you need to be moving quick if you want to keep it full and be maximizing your gem income. ![]() Keep filling it up, and you can get up to 4x the gems to drop from each enemy you fell, which can hugely affect the value and quantity of things you can buy in the shops. Part of this incentive to speed up is further tied to your gem meter, which fills a little with each defeated foe and starts steadily decreasing right away. Open spaces are closing up, potential chains of foes are separating, and you’re continually being prodded to act now or miss your chance. This means that there’s a little bit of breathing room for you to pause and survey the board while plotting out your next moves, but there’s still a lot of pressure on you because the state of the board is changing even as you’re studying it. However, even if you don’t move at all, blocks will still fall at a slower, albeit unceasing, pace. Rather like a Mystery Dungeon game, every falling block will move down one cell every time you take a step or hit an enemy. ![]() Things are made even more interesting by the fact that there are two speeds at which blocks will fall. 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. Levels present you with an 8x8 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. 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. 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. 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. Pocket Dungeon follows a relatively simple narrative wherein the titular knight discovers a magical puzzle cube while out and about. 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. 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. 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. Yacht Club’s newest spin-off of its critically lauded Shovel Knight franchise is, in a word, addictive. 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.
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