Free Shovel Knight Expansion Offers a New Way to Play

With the release of Shovel Knight on PlayStation platforms coming in April, developer Yacht Club Games has announced the details of what sounds like a pretty extensive expansion it'll soon launch for free.

Plague of Shadows places players in the role of the Plague Knight, one of the bosses from the base game. You'll play through a modified version of the original campaign, with new objectives, enemies, areas, paths, feats, and bosses being included to keep things from feeling too familiar. The story is being changed to account for the change in protagonist. In this version, the Plague Knight is attempting to create a new type of potion, the Serum Supernus, that requires him to secure ingredients from the game's bosses.

Plague Knight also plays differently from the titular Shovel Knight; explosives and bomb jumps will mix up the moment-to-moment gameplay, and a new loot and alchemy system will let you craft equipment and power-ups.

This expansion represents the first component of what Yacht Club has planned for the game's stretch goals. When Shovel Knight was crowdfunded through Kickstarter, it far exceeded its goal, raising over $311,000 when it asked for just $75,000. That meant extra content would be developed, including playable Boss Knights, the first of which we're seeing here. Yacht Club appears to be doing much more than it had initially promised, though, considering the Kickstarter only said the Boss Knights would "play differently" and the "story and dialog will change a little bit to reflect the changes."

The Plague of Shadows expansion is coming to all platforms--Wii U, 3DS, PS3, PS4, Vita, PC, Mac, and Linux--sometime during 2015's second quarter (April-June). You can check out a handful of screenshots from it in the gallery below.