Shovel Knight is already a cracking fighty platformer – have you played it? – but developers Yacht Club Games have kept adding to it as they tick off stretch goals from the Kickstarter which funded it. The dastardly Plague Knight got his own campaign last year and now Yacht Club have revealed the next boss becoming playable in a free update, Specter Knight. He’s an agile-looking fella with tricks like climbing walls and air dash attacks to get around, as a few GIFs of him in motion show. Yes, King Knight and more modes are still coming too.

Specter Knight is all about fast strikes, dashing with them in any direction like so:



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Yacht Club are building on lessons learned from making Shovel Knight’s campaign, they say. “We made many iterations (threw out a lot of ideas), and learned some great lessons on how best to extend and change up the existing Shovel Knight game world.” They continue:

“With that experience fresh in our minds, the team here is now working on all remaining campaigns and updates at once! That means Specter Knight, King Knight, Body Swap, and Battle Mode (for PC and consoles). That’s a lot more game — and it should arrive sooner than the wait between Shovel Knight and Plague Knight. Creating these updates simultaneously will allow us to plan more cohesively. How levels change between the two characters, how much time is needed for new mechanics/systems, stories interweaving, and so on. Once we’re nearing completion on one set of updates, we’ll be switching our focus to a single campaign to make sure it’s polished for release. Then we’ll be doing the same by switching to the next campaign!”

Though they’re not yet sure when either will be finished, Specter Knight’s campaign will come before King Knight. Battle Mode is same-screen competitive multiplayer, while Body Swap mode can turn duderinos into dudettes and vice versa. One of these modes will launch with each new campaign.



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The blog post has plenty more details on all this, not to mention more animated GIFs of Specter Knight slashing around – pristine GIFs which haven’t suffered me feeding them through Gfycat.