Yacht Club Games Is Carving Out a Place in the Gaming Sphere

Yacht Club Games has been around for over eight years now, but it’s easy to think they’re younger than that considering they’re still only known for one game: Shovel Knight. The game originally released in June 2014, but the development team, which consists of ex-WayForward staffers responsible for Double Dragon Neon, has been working on downloadable content ever since. They promised a bunch of new features during the crowdfunding campaign, and wanted to fulfill them before moving on to something else. It would not be an understatement to say the content took much longer to complete than expected. But they finally finished it with the Treasure Trove at the end of 2019.

Still, it will take time for them to prepare their next projects, so they’re wisely publishing games from other developers that can benefit from their good name in the meantime, and outsourcing development of projects to other studios.

It gets funny when even those games take longer than expected to finish. Take Cyber Shadow from Mechanical Head Studios, originally presumed to be due in either the fall of 2019 or in early 2020 when Yacht Club Games was revealed as the publisher last March. But they’ve taken their time with providing so much as a release timeframe. Given the kind of game it is, a 2D ninja platformer with a presentation style reminiscent of the NES Ninja Gaiden games, it didn’t seem like it would take long to complete. But as the aforementioned Shovel Knight proved, and several other games of this type, even making 8-bit-style titles is more work than some people think.

The new Yacht Club Games Presents stream provided the first trailer since March of last year — the “Story Trailer” specifically. It shows protagonist Shadow remembering his friends and fighting his enemies, but it’s vague about the particulars. Importantly, it reveals how even the cutscene style will be inspired by the story presentation from the old Ninja Gaiden games. No one is making games like the old NG titles anymore, so this is fine. Through the new gameplay glimpse, it unsurprisingly looks as good as it did in previous trailers. The game will arrive in fall 2020 for all current-generation platforms.

As a bonus: The Switch version will support the Shovel Knight Amiibo. Using it will summon miniature versions of either Shovel Knight, Plague Knight, Specter Knight, and King Knight. Just how useful they’ll be is another question, which we should see in a future video.

Shovel Knight Dig was announced on the previous Yacht Club Games Presents stream.  The game is being developed by Nitrome and will have a presentation style that resembles a Super Nintendo game, though the core game will contain a larger focus on digging. Not much of it was shown here, but Yacht Club announced a new character known as the Hive Knight, a bug-loving Hexcavator who travels with his insect-like partner Beeto. The Hive Knight can battle and fly, with Beeto providing assistance. The game will launch sometime in 2021, making this yet another title coming later than expected. Platforms still haven’t been confirmed, but it’s at least coming to PlayStation 4 given how Sony posted info about the announcement on the PlayStation Blog. It would be a surprise if this didn’t come to everything.

The new game announced was Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon, a falling block puzzle adventure game being primarily developed by Vine. The player can control Shovel Knight or other characters from the main game, who can shift around the puzzle sections of each level and bump into enemies to defeat them. Levels will also have obstacles that can be toppled and items to be obtained, while others will be dungeons with more traps than enemies. The risk here will involve whether the playable character has enough health or the right skills to take out a bunch of enemies or pass the more dangerous traps. The adventure sections, meanwhile, will involve the playable character travelling from one location or battle to another using an overhead grid. It sounds like an intriguing project, at the very least.

Like other titles Yacht Club Games is publishing, it will be a while before this arrives considering they aren’t confident enough to provide so much as a release timeframe. No platforms were confirmed either, but the trailer was uploaded to the PlayStation YouTube account and the demo will be playable on Switch at PAX East, so we know two of them.

None of the titles shown are being primarily handled internally at Yacht Club Games. Instead, they’re working on two new projects. It would be a surprise if one of them wasn’t a Shovel Knight sequel, unless they’re feeling very risky, but they weren’t even subtle with implying that one of them will be a new IP. What kind of game will it be? Who’s helming it? Lots of questions here, but this, at the very least, means Yacht Club is doing well enough to hire a second team and work on two titles simultaneously. They might provide more info about them later this year; I’m not confident enough to say they will.

Considering there was no big-time announcement here, there wasn’t much of a point in presenting all of this through a stream. But it wasn’t long, so there’s little to complain about. All these games will take a while to complete, so expect to see them again in another such presentation soon.