Introduction:
Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight is a game whose Kickstarter campaign‘s success may be attributable to, above other merits, nostalgia for the NES era of games whose aesthetics and gameplay Shovel Knight promised to deliver. It’s a winning formula, and one on which many other projects have been happy to capitalize: sell the gaming population its own childhood.
Such projects, often full of wry nods toward and inside jokes from NES and SNES titles, wear the clothes of classics. They have pixel art as a matter of convention, and scrolling text as a matter of principle. But Shovel Knight is a special game, because it does not merely wear the clothes of the classics; it is a classic, every bit as deserving of acclaim and status as are the titles whose trappings got it funded.
As From a Time Machine:
![[Work: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, (Pearl Poet), c. late 1300s] The Green Knight's Wife: Space and Gender Relations in the Chivalric Romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight](https://i0.wp.com/thegemsbok.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Sir-Gawain-and-the-Green-Knight-Illustration-of-Lady-Betrilak-2.jpg?fit=319%2C350&ssl=1&resize=200%2C200)
![[Game: Elden Ring, FromSoftware, 2022] Tarnishing: A Thorough Critique Detailing the Few Mechanical Flaws of FromSoft’s Elden Ring](https://i0.wp.com/thegemsbok.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Elden-Ring-screenshot-with-draconic-tree-sentinel.png?fit=722%2C406&ssl=1&resize=200%2C200)
![[Work: The Stranger, Albert Camus, 1942] Smiling While Despised: The Ending of Albert Camus' The Stranger and the Beginning of Authenticity](https://i0.wp.com/thegemsbok.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/The-Stranger-book-cover.png?fit=262%2C400&ssl=1&resize=200%2C200)
![[Game: Dark Souls, FromSoftware, 2011] Unchosen Undead: A Thorough Existentialist Philosophical Analysis of FromSoftware’s Original Dark Souls](https://i0.wp.com/thegemsbok.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Dark-Souls-screenshot-with-Darksign.png?fit=722%2C406&ssl=1&resize=200%2C200)