Overall, I found that Plague of Shadows actually has a negative difficulty curve levels do get harder later on, but not nearly as quickly as Plague Knight gets better.

Again, you’ll get more abilities and options as you progress, but it can be pretty frustrating at first. He can lob his potions into the air, or throw them downward at an angle if he is in midair himself. He doesn’t just throw things in front of him, that would be far too simple. You’ll also need some practice with Plague Knight’s attacks. but it means you have some retraining to do. Plague Knight plays truly differently than the original protagonist, which is both great for extending replayability and adding more fun. You can get items that help with this - the Vat, for instance, is invaluable in later levels - but they don’t do you any good when you’re first starting out. It’s not unusual to launch yourself into spikes, or overshoot your target and fall into a pit.

He has a lot of aerial tricks, but they’re hard to handle at first. Part of it perhaps is that Plague Knight’s controls take some getting used to. I grew up playing Mario and Mega Man, and even the hard mode of Shovel Knight didn’t give me a whole lot of trouble, so I was surprised to find that Plague of Shadows is hard. To begin, a bit of a warning about difficulty, and the leap that happens during this expansion. There's a lot of content being added here, so let's dive right in. This one follows Plague Knight as he hunts down his fellow members of the Order in order to gather ingredients for his Serum Supernus, the ultimate potion. They’ve introduced a new Challenge Mode, added new secret areas to every level, and released a whole second storyline running parallel to the first. As seems to be the norm, Yacht Club Games dug a little deeper than that. Plague of Shadows was supposed to just give players access to another character: Plague Knight, the mad alchemist of the Order of No Quarter.

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