Plus the wealth of unlockable characters adds to its replayability. The Adventure story may be short-lived if you take to the mechanics quickly enough, but it's a fantastic experience while it lasts. Discovering that larger puzzle, which may end up taking several runs, just adds to the satisfaction of seeing the adventure unfold. It's clear from the start that there's more going on, but as you play through, you'll progressively uncover more information about what's really going on. Shovel Knight and various other characters from the world are drawn into the Pocket Dungeon, and a new character, Puzzle Knight, asks them to help him solve the mystery of how to escape. There is also a larger, meta-puzzle at play in the Adventure mode story. That meant I had to treat it like a rogue-lite and start a fresh run every time. I fruitlessly bashed my head against later stages that I had fast-traveled to before realizing that I needed to engage with the game on its own terms. You do get the option to fast-travel to later stages, but this is essentially only good for familiarizing yourself with new enemies, since you need to have gathered some Relics to stand a chance in later areas. The game is built to be played as a rogue-lite, with your power level increasing as you make your way through various stages. Those might be as simple and straightforward as an HP increase, or as strategically complex as giving you +1 damage for every 10 steps you take. You use your gathered gems to purchase Relics that will then become available out in the field, and you can usually purchase one Relic upgrade per stage. On top of this foundation, the game introduces its rogue-lite dungeon crawler elements. Part of the joy of a run is often discovering a new boss and knowing that defeating them will bring them back to your camp so you can play with their new powers. King Knight can perform a powerful shoulder-charge from a distance, at the expense of his own health. Spectre Knight, meanwhile, actually loses HP when he drinks restorative potions, but regains life by defeating enemies. Tinker Knight, for example, is more vulnerable than Shovel Knight with lower HP, but he can use the metal pieces he gathers from a stage to temporarily build a super-powerful mech suit that rips through enemies. Seeing how their action-game abilities have been transmogrified into this new genre concept is always a thrill, and they introduce wildly different ways to play. The game unlocks various other knights from the Order of No Quarter, each with their own powers. While Shovel Knight is the star and lead character, he's far from the only one. When you find items lying around the world, they're immediately recognizable with short, pithy descriptions to cue you in on their functions. The fiendish simplicity of the mechanics starts to iterate on itself as you encounter new enemy types with special properties, like growing much stronger in groups or vanishing after the first strike until you hit something else. Yacht Club and Vine have done a masterful job of meticulously introducing how all of the pieces fit together so naturally that you hardly notice how much you've learned after the first handful of times playing. If all that makes Pocket Dungeon sound overwhelming, don't worry in practice it's anything but. Essentially, it's a puzzle game that feels like an action game. Both you and your enemies have a series of tick-marks to signify your HP. Enemies move whenever you move, but a timer ticks down and then they'll move independently as well. You're often looking to eliminate large groups of enemies at a time, but you can just as easily take out single enemies to clear a path or create space for a larger clump. You ram yourself into enemies to eliminate them, which means your own movement around the grid is a large part of the strategy. It's a tile-matching puzzle game, but rather than a cursor, your character is its own tile on the board. Right from the start, Pocket Dungeon's core mechanics defy easy categorization.
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