When Shovel Knight was little more than a pitch on Kickstarter, its stretch goals included additional campaigns starring the Knights of the Order of No Quarter, the eclectic group of villains who stand between Shovel Knight and his goal within the Tower of Fate. Enough stretch goals were reached for three of the Order to receive their own campaigns. Plague of Shadows is the first. It stars Plague Knight, the excitable alchemist wearing a distinctive plague doctor mask who specializes in brewing explosive concoctions. His adventure mirrors Shovel Knight’s, charting an identical course across the land as Plague Knight plots to capture the essences of the Knights of No Quarter. Only with these final ingredients can he create the Ultimate Potion, an elaborate creation he hopes will impress his secret love.
Plague Knight immediately distinguishes himself from the series’ primary and archetypical platforming protagonist, Shovel Knight. He moves slowly. His jumps are comparatively short. Even the addition of a double jump doesn’t help him gain much altitude. The first wall he reaches in the first level proves an impassable barrier. Only a lesson indirectly provided by a pair of Plague Knight’s minions shows me how he may overcome this obstacle.
Plague Knight’s primary platforming ability is the Bomb Burst. If I hold down the attack button, Plague Knight will flash after a moment. Releasing it after this point causes an explosion that boosts him much higher than his basic jumps. Bomb Bursting suits Plague Knight’s erratic personality. It’s indiscriminately violent, damaging enemies and destroying fragile dirt blocks caught in its blast radius. Plague Knight himself is unharmed by the blast but it sends him flying at high speed and a sharp angle. If I’m not careful about the direction he is moving before executing a Burst, I may send him straight into a bottomless pit or a deadly spike trap. Early on, exploiting the Bomb Burst to cross the levels’ many platforming obstacles seems like it will be my greatest challenge in beating Plague of Shadows. Fortunately I am not required to use its erratic initial form.
After completing the first level, Plague Knight gains access to his secret hideout, the Potionarium. Here, he may use treasure and collectable Cipher Coins looted from each level to purchase upgrades for his abilities from his assistant Mona. The most significant of these are improvements to the Bomb Burst. Most upgrades add new offensive capabilities to the Burst without altering the speed and angle at which it sends Plague Knight flying. The most useful upgrade is the one which does alter these properties, Float Burst, which transforms the Burst’s default extreme launch into a leisurely glide. Once airborne, Plague Knight is granted incredible control over where he goes and when he lands. With the purchase of a single cheap upgrade, Plague Knight goes from a platforming player character humbled by Shovel Knight’s leaping prowess to one who shames his opponent.
Plague Knight’s Float Burst breaks open most of the platforming obstacles that challenge Shovel Knight. When one player character is forced to follow the laws of gravity and another is not, the weightless player character will have an advantage in most platforming spaces. This wouldn’t be a problem if Plague Knight were restricted to his own unique spaces designed for his particular jumping mechanics. Unfortunately for Plague of Shadows, Plague Knight is instead implanted into a world much too similar to Shovel Knight’s Shovel of Hope campaign.
Plague Knight navigates the same world map that Shovel Knight explores and enters the same levels in the same rough order. Each level has him follow the same routes through the same rooms. Secrets are hidden behind the same walls and beyond the same barriers. He even finds the same Relics sequestered in the same chests, though he dismisses them as useless trinkets he can trade to Chester, a wandering merchant, for tools more specialized to his skillset.
The levels are not completely identical. Some spaces are re-designed with Plague Knight’s platforming skills in mind. Those that aren’t totally redesigned instead have Cipher Coins, the new collectable Plague Knight needs to access his core abilities, precariously placed in spots only reachable with the Bomb Burst. This same Bomb Burst trivializes rooms that require forethought and practiced skill to overcome with Shovel Knight. Where the series’ star has to bounce off kraken tentacles or manipulate a device that spews rainbow platforms to reach the far side of some rooms, Plague Knight can simply float past these obstacles with the Float Burst.
In addition to the same general spaces, Plague Knight also fights the same enemies that bedeviled Shovel Knight during his adventure. This is where Plague Knight’s unique abilities feel particularly out of place. Shovel Knight’s shovel blade makes up for its limited range with bouncing capabilities that let its wielder hop repeatedly on enemies’ heads until they are defeated. The enemies in the Shovel of Hope campaign are designed around these limitations and abilities.
Plague Knight attacks by throwing bombs. At first these tools seem almost as limited as Shovel Knight’s shovel blade. Plague Knight can throw multiple explosives a short distance at a low arc. This allows him to stay at a safe distance from his enemies, the vast majority of whom have melee attacks, but finding an angle where his bombs can actually hit them can be as challenging as Shovel Knight needing to get in his enemies’ faces to damage them. I soon learn that with a little more effort, Plague Knight’s offensive capabilities completely outclass his opponent’s.
Plague Knight’s advantages come mostly from versatility. Once he has access to his Potionarium, he can buy explosive customizations from Mona, the same assistant who helps modify his Bomb Burst. New casings create bomb variations that may be lobbed in a high arc, that float forward for a second before curving upward, or even spin in a defensive ring around Plague Knight. Different powders change the bombs’ explosions, from a simple damaging burst, to fires that crawl along the wall and ceiling, to a stacking explosion that grows more powerful the more bombs are thrown into a localized area. The final toggle changes the timer on the explosion. This sounds trivial but a second longer or shorter is often the difference between an explosion reaching its target or missing it entirely.
There are a half-dozen bomb customizations each in three categories that may be combined in dozens of different ways, letting Plague Knight create a distinct offensive loadout for every unique situation. He begins his adventure limited by options. Focusing the resources he claims from completed levels into new bomb customizations quickly opens a vast number of choices for overcoming every obstacle in his way. There’s even a quick menu that freezes time and lets me swap out Plague Knight’s bomb parts with a few button presses, encouraging me to change up his loadout every few seconds to suit every new situation.
The versatility of Plague Knight’s bombs and every enemy in Plague of Shadows being designed for the melee-oriented Shovel Knight results in trivial combat difficulty. Many enemies may be defeated in seconds by pelting them with explosives from a safe distance, including the Order of No Quarter, who repeat their attack patterns from the Shovel of Hope campaign.
Only a new duel against Shovel Knight offers something completely new. He keeps in melee range for aggressive attacks with his shovel blade and uses his Relics to regenerate health and become temporarily invulnerable, all abilities designed specifically to counteract Plague Knight’s toolkit. These are the same abilities Shovel Knight has access to in Shovel of Hope, making the duel against him feel like a confrontation with an especially skilled player of that campaign. His is the first encounter where Plague of Shadows feels like a whole new experience instead of an echo of one I’ve already played before.
Plague Knight’s abilities are a deliberate contrast to Shovel Knight’s, and not always to Plague of Shadows’ benefit. Much more interesting is Plague Knight’s narrative, which neatly co-exists alongside Shovel Knight’s, often deliberately inverting it in interesting ways.
I am led to believe in the Shovel of Hope campaign that every Knight in the Order of No Quarter is fanatically loyal to the Enchantress, the sorceress who has taken up residence in the Tower of Fate and threatens the people of the kingdom. Plague of Shadows gives me reason to question that assumption. Plague Knight is not a heroic character, abusing his minions and operating a clandestine underworld beneath normal society. Nor is he totally evil. His membership in the Order of No Quarter is to further his own ends and he notably does not use his alchemical skill to win his love’s affection with a brainwashing draught, instead looking to impress her with an expression of pure skill.
Plague of Shadows seems to take place concurrently with the events of Shovel of Hope and seeing the world from Plague Knight’s perspective gives me new insights into its function. If Shovel Knight fails to claim a Relic, he may purchase it later from a man named Chester. It’s not totally clear how Chester obtains them. Plague of Shadows provides a possible explanation: Plague Knight finds any Relics that Shovel Knight misses and trades them to Chester for his personalized items. Several other characters who appear to be ordinary townsfolk in Shovel of Hope are shown to be secret associates of Plague Knight’s, operating out of their own stalls in the Potionarium. Though Plague Knight is mostly barred from polite society, he is able to meet with some of Shovel Knight’s allies, like the Troupple King, to obtain new services. Plague of Shadows may not capitalize on its player character’s abilities but it does take advantage of his perspective.
Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows is similar to the Shovel of Hope campaign that fostered it. This means it carries forward many of its predecessor’s strengths, including the incredible retro graphics, the tight controls, and a number of post-game challenges to keep me replaying long after I have first hit credits. Its main problem is it’s too similar to Shovel of Hope, recycling most of its level geometry and enemy behavior despite introducing a new player character with radically different platforming and offensive skillsets. This is probably the reason that Plague of Shadows is the only Shovel Knight campaign which is not available as a standalone download on digital storefronts. It’s an addendum to the Shovel of Hope campaign, not an original product, and it feels like it from start to finish. It’s interesting to see how a new player character behaves in another one’s sandbox but Plague of Shadows is by far the most disposable of Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove’s single-player content.