DIGGY BANK

Wallowing in my avarice in SHOVEL KNIGHT: TREASURE TROVE

- Matthew Elliott

Sometimes, in the dark hours, I find myself Googling stuff I owned as a kid, primarily as a means of clinging to the rain-slick precipice of youth with shrivelled fingers. These toys are universally worse than I remembered: Fire-damaged faces, limited articulation, feeble accessories. The whole enterprise feels like inventing a time machine just so I can travel back 30-ish years and laugh at my own idiot self for ever thinking old things were good.

Shovel Knight is different. It’s like opening the toy box in your parents’ attic and discovering that no, you’re not a slack-jawed buffoon for revering the past; that somehow, the April O’Neil figure you married as a child is actually a captivating, erudite human being who doesn’t even mind being locked in a box half her lifetime. You were