Shovel Knight: The Plague Knight Subplot Nobody Expected

Shovel Knight’s original campaign was a tribute to NES-era platformers with a straightforward hero arc. Yacht Club Games then built three additional campaigns for the game’s villains, and the Plague Knight campaign — Plague of Shadows — is the most subversive.

Plague Knight is canonically in love with his assistant Mona, and the entire campaign is his attempt to create a perfected explosive to impress her. The game’s main story — which Shovel Knight occupies as a background NPC — runs in parallel, and Plague Knight’s campaign shows the Shovel Knight campaign’s events from the side.

At the campaign’s climax, Plague Knight succeeds in creating the ultimate explosive and has the power to destroy everything. He chooses instead to use the explosion to create fireworks — an elaborate confession of love that Mona receives while covered in explosion soot, bewildered and charmed.

Yacht Club built a complete romance arc into the villain campaign of a game that appeared to be a competent NES pastiche. Plague of Shadows is frequently cited as the campaign with the most genuine emotional payoff in the entire Shovel Knight series.