No matter how many times I try to casually play this game from time to time it never gives anything but frustration after very few runs. It's painfully repetitive, to compensate for being incredibly short. Runs barely ever feel different and it just doesn't feel good as a roguelike at all.

It's just a bunch of Shovel Knight's design sensibilities put out of context into RNG roguelike design and cramped vertical level design, the relics and modifiers are incredibly trivial and offer no interesting synergies or random value to each run. They're as shallow as "do you want to throw something diagonally or directly down?" and percs are "jump a little farther" or "dig quicker". There's no real strategy and you can only have one relic anyway, making it feel completely pointless.

There are very specific set things you can do on any given run and doing them over and over after dying and going back to the beginning just amounts to insane tedium and exhaustion at having to do said things again.
All around it feels like the Shovel Knight pieces that are there are fun, but completely at odds with the randomization and it just results in bogging both down.

A lot of the quests and objectives from the hub world also feel like very boring busy work for the sake of replayability. Not to mention the multi step true ending quest of the game being ridiculously convoluted I never even bothered to do it.

Even trying to ignore all the side content and focusing solely on going down as far as possible in an arcade fashion the game is still just so frustrating I usually don't go beyond like 20 minutes playing. Usually runs ending at the very annoying boss fights. Bosses which feel designed very similarly to original Shovel Knight (I don't like them there at all either) but since it's a roguelike said bosses send you back to the beginning, which is way more frustrating.

All around I just wish this didn't have to be a roguelike. Or at least had some less padding to it. Because the basis of the control (which is Shovel Knight's controls) is fairly fun. Visuals are also very appealing and the music is incredible. I just wish it was a game I had fun playing.

fun but hard game.would recommend