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So for Christmas, I got a $20 Nintendo e-shop gift card. And with that, I got a 2D platformer called Shovel Knight. I initially only played about thirty minutes of it before getting distracted by Super Mystery Dungeon. However, I've recently been playing it a lot more. And I enjoy every second of it. Shovel Knight just does so many things right in terms of what video games are capable of doing, and what many games don't even bother to do. For starters, the game has a great difficulty curve. It's starts off rather easy and somewhat simple. And as you progress through the game, the game gets steadily harder and complex. This seems like something completely natural for video games to do, but these days, it's usually either insanely hard stuff, or a difficulty setting with a static difficulty curve the whole way through. But with Shovel Knight? Nope. It presents its levels, and asks you, the player, to beat it. Not that the game isn't able to be played by everybody. In retrospect, the game is actually quite forgiving, but still punishing. Whenever you die, you get sent back to the last checkpoint and lose a large sum of your current money. However, if you manage to make your way back to where you died, you get the chance to reclaim whatever money you lost the last time you died. This is a very good system, because it gives you a sense of, "get up and try again". And it's much better than a lives system from a game like Mario. You can try as many times as you like without much repercussion. And now, I would like to talk about my favorite thing about Shovel Knight. Once I realized that this game was doing this, I started tearing up. And that's the fact that the game has no tutorials, but still teaches the player. Games these days shove so many tutorials down the player's throat, that you just kinda wish they were just not there. But Shovel Knight comes along and ditches them completely. Rather than tutorials, the game teaches by playing. The best example of this, in my opinion, is in Shovel Knight's stage. One of the reoccurring gimmicks in that stage is ice stuck to the wall. Touching it causes the ice to fall as a platform onto spikes below. So, how does the game teach you this? Well, you fall down a pit, and you fall onto that ice. That's how you learn that touching the ice makes safe platforms. There is no sense of danger at that point, and only in points after that. At that point, if that causes you to die, then it's your fault. The game does this consecutively. It presents a gimmick in a safe environment, and then mixes that with more dangerous situations. This makes every single death not your fault. This is something that I really wish more games did. It truly is a beautiful thing when a game can do this. And that's all I really want to talk about. And for anybody wondering how much I really like this game...well, let's just say that, from a design-only perspective, this is one of the best games I've ever played. I'm not sure what I would rate it on a 1-10 scale, but it would definitely be at least an 8.5. Well, that's all folks! Thanks for reading, if you did!