‘Shovel Knight’ was a surprise hit for Yacht Club Games. Yacht Club Games finds there’s more retro life after ‘Shovel Knight’ 25 release of “Ghosts ’n Goblins Resurrection” for the Nintendo Switch, wears difficulty like a badge of pride. Creator Tokuro Fujiwara, who has returned to the series this week with the Feb. The game is also notorious for being difficult. The original “Ghosts ’n Goblins” was instrumental in its early video game exploration of fantasy horror and Western myths, putting players in control of a character who is more or less King Arthur with colorful underpants. Satan wasn’t actually defeated.īut as a child of the ’80s, whose first vision of all-things-spooky was more or less the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the fairy tale-meets-horror mashup of the early levels of “Ghosts ’n Goblins” was enough to make a visual impression - and make me excited to explore its return. The game itself would essentially express annoyance if players managed to reach the ending, throwing them back to the beginning to do everything all over again.

My nostalgia for the franchise pretty much stopped there too. When I first played “Ghosts ’n Goblins” as a kid in the mid-1980s, little me enjoyed the digital squeaks that accompanied every throw of a spear, the zombies that pop out of the cemetery in the first level and, well, I’m not sure if I got much further than that in the game.