Aside from the brisk pacing and best-in-class crunchy chiptunes (even before I picked up the game I was listening to the stage 1 music on loop), Cyber Shadow retains that most precious and most frequently forgotten of 8-bit game design tropes: faith in the player.
Still, Cyber Shadow is closer to its inspirations than Shovel Knight was to its. Checkpoints can even be upgraded to give the player an edge in the upcoming area if they’re having trouble, similar to bonfire upgrades in Dark Souls. There’s no scoring, lives have been replaced by checkpoints, there are secret collectibles to encourage revisiting stages, and the two-button control scheme has been augmented with charge attacks and directional input combinations. Two, Cyber Shadow knows what exactly makes the NES classics tick and is willing to make heretical cuts in pursuit of excellence.Īs with the previous title from publisher Yacht Club, Cyber Shadow doesn’t take 1980s game design conventions as a package deal. It wouldn’t be the first game from a solo dev with ambitions beyond its grasp, after all. One, Cyber Shadow is too sloppily made to competently reproduce its inspirations. This suggests two possible interpretations. Conspicuously, in Cyber Shadow they cannot. The NES is rich with quality games that follow this fairly specific genre template, and in all of them the player can duck. Everything about the visual language of Cyber Shadow, from the sprite work to the ninja theming to the CRT filters, suggests a game that deliberately follows in the footsteps of action platformer NES classics like Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden, Natsume’s Shatterhand and Shadow of the Ninja, Sunsoft’s Batman, and so on.
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