Shovel Knight dev asks, 'What game should we make next?'

Deciding what thing you're going to make is often surprisingly difficult, so I can understand why Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games has outsourced picking the premise for its second game to its fans. OK, so it hasn't done that exactly, but it has released a poll asking fans what sort of game they'd like to see next from the studio. There are a bunch of ideas on the form, and you can rate each one on a scale from 'not excited' to 'very excited'.

The ideas include a Shovel Knight sequel, a Shovel Knight-themed karting game (not sure they're being entirely serious there), a Spelunky-like, a Metroidvania, and various others styled after retro games you may have some nostalgia for. It's a bit sad that every idea is framed in relation to an existing game, but then again Shovel Knight is great, and fairly original, despite owing a lot to Mega Man.

Me, I want Yacht Club to make whatever game it wants to make next, but if it's totally stumped by indecision, a new Landstalker-ish isometric action-adventure could be pretty fab.

In case you missed it, Shovel Knight is getting another free campaign, this one starring the acrobatic, British-autocorrect-hating Specter Knight.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.

Latest in Action
Assassin's Creed Shadows Twitch Drops - An upper-body shot of Yasuke standing in a battlefield at night, lit by a fire.
All Assassin's Creed Shadows Twitch Drops and how to get them
Best Assassin's Creed Shadows armour - Naoe with her arm back about to attack with a katana.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows sneakily tones down the mess players can make across Japan’s religious sites in its day one patch
assassin's creed shadows protector's armor
Grab this ridiculously overpowered Yasuke armor as soon as possible in Assassin's Creed Shadows
Split Fiction trailer still - Zoe and Mio staring into a large pipe
A pair of Split Fiction players will be heading to Sweden for an early look at Hazelight's next game after completing a secret challenge so tough, some developers can 'barely' beat it
Best Assassin's Creed Shadows skills - A close-up shot of Naoe wearing a blue floral outfit and headband.
Best skills in Assassin's Creed Shadows
Hollow Knight: Silksong — character art of Hornet, Silksong's protagonist, brandishing her weapon
Silksong's weary hollows tossed another scrap of hope from Xbox on high, as a blog post namedrops it next to other 'upcoming games'
Latest in News
A Helldiver charges through the fire and flames in Helldivers 2.
Helldivers 2 CCO Johan Pilestedt says the industry's got it backwards by putting features over fundamentals: 'We talk way too little about the core philosophy'
Marvel Rivals codes - Venom and other heroes
'A developer who actually listens': Marvel Rivals' devs fix accidental Peni Parker nerf just 9 short hours after saying they would
A forester from Old School Runescape, contemplating life next to his pheasant friend on a green field.
You can finally try out Old School RuneScape’s first new skill in nearly two decades right now
Half-Life 2 running on 8 MB VRAM on a tiny resolution in Windows XP with graphics settings disabled or lowered to ridiculously light levels
Getting Half-Life 2 to work on 8 MB of VRAM means turning it into an eerily befitting voidscape: 'there were absolutely no effects left'
Best Assassin's Creed Shadows armour - Naoe with her arm back about to attack with a katana.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows sneakily tones down the mess players can make across Japan’s religious sites in its day one patch
OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.
ChatGPT faces legal complaint after a user inputted their own name and found it accused them of made-up crimes