I’m only about an hour into Yacht Club Games’ Shovel Knight, but I already know this will be one of my favorites of 2014.

Successfully funded on Kickstarter in early 2013, the final product is nothing short of stunning. I actually feel bad that I wasn’t able to contribute to its campaign last year — I was in the middle of moving and changing jobs at the time — but something tells me I’ll be buying at least a couple different versions of it before all is said and done.

Available for the PC, 3DS, and Wii U, Shovel Knight is a prime example of balancing childhood nostalgia with streamlined, modern design. It looks good in screenshots, but it truly comes to life in motion, with multi-plane parallax scrolling that was more common in the 16-bit generation, although there were several 8-bit games that did make use of this technique. Whether it’s accurate or not doesn’t matter; it looks terrific.

Use of color, art direction, and character animation are all top-notch and pop off the screen. There aren’t any artificial graphic filters here, so the sprites are crisp with every last square pixel shining through beautifully, exactly how I like it.

There’s a surprisingly personal story intermixed with the game’s humorous presentation, and the writing throughout is superb. You won’t find any badly translated text in Shovel Knight, although who knows? There might be some later for nostalgia’s sake.

Then there’s the soundtrack, which is also mind-bogglingly good. You can listen to and buy it for any price HERE, and they even offer the original NES .NSF file download for free. Talk about going above and beyond.

Even this early on, there’s so much good stuff happening. Talking to the quirky townsfolk uncovers all sorts of useful information and helpful hints, hidden areas, mini-games, a music player, and upgrades.

The actual stages are full of dangerous enemies, tiny platforms, and fun challenges that take some planning if you’re going to collect every gem strewn throughout each screen. With such intuitive, responsive controls, playing through Shovel Knight has been an absolute joy so far.

I’m going to go out on a limb (but not really) by predicting that I’ll be giving this game an A — if not an A+ — by the time I’m done with it. There are certain games where you can just tell within a short time playing it. This is one of those games.