Platforms, Linux , Mac, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Switch, Windows, and Xbox One
I quickly realised something terrible playing Cyber Shadow, a new throwback ninja platformer from Aarne “MekaSkull” Hunziker and Yacht Club Games. I realised that I was absolutely and unequivocally not the kind of person that Cyber Shadow was designed for, nor could I be.
When you die in Cyber Shadow you hear a voice-sampled scream. I heard that scream a lot. I’ve heard that scream so many times that I’m starting to hear it in my everyday life. When my son pushes a cup of milk onto the floor or when my dog drags mud onto the carpet or when I open the fridge to find that we are running out of milk.
Cyber Shadow’s difficulty is tuned to take advantage of a particular Nintendo Entertainment System-honed muscle-memory. A continuous stream of little failures and setbacks are an integral part of a game design that calls back to games I never played. It was far from Ryu Hayabusa’s ninja side stories that I was raised, shattered hands weren’t part of my youth, and happily, the only Blue Shadows I knew were from a song in The Three Amigos.
When I think on the difficult games of my childhood, I remember plodding trial-and-error adventures featuring a fedora wearing, off-balanced egg or the cheating CPU in countless soccer simulations. I remember running to my father in despair, tears streaming down my face, as I declared to him that Super Kick-Off on the Mega Drive was too challenging for my mushy microcomputer muddled digits. I imagine that in some far off living room in, say, Yellow Springs, Ohio, another child my age was flinging that same cartridge onto a pile of recently “solved” video games.
The games that I mastered in my early life tended to be on the simpler, less demanding side of things. I was good at Sherlock Holmes on the Mega CD because it resembled those plodding computer adventures, only replace the eggs with men and the fedoras with deerstalkers. Something like Batman Returns was beyond my grasp. I hate those driving levels as much as I hate the little digitised scream in Cyber Shadow.
All of this is to say that, Cyber Shadow may be the game for you if you are the player for it. There were times when I felt as though I’d internalised its mechanics to a certain degree. Dashing and parrying through some attacks felt great, but these moments of slick evasion came after countless deaths and retries. Initially, the game feels quite limited, there’s not a lot of room to improvise and success is down to pattern recognition and exploitation. Later, things improve as Shadow, the cyber ninja of the title, gains more abilities.
The first major boss of the game is kind of a gimme. The pattern is easy to spot and exploit, and made even a fumbled-fingered buffoon like me feel like that hypothetical Yellow Springs, OH, video game wizard. A couple of screens later, I longed for the dead-eyed, stubby armed embrace of Dizzy the Egg. With Dizzy, I know where I stand, his failures are my failures. With Shadow, I feel like I’m letting him down.
There’s something for the fact that I kept trying though. It’s a testament to Cyber Shadow’s presentation and control. Like Yacht Club’s own Shovel Knight, Cyber Shadow offers graphics beyond the capabilities of the NES that nevertheless look and feel authentic to your fondest memories of your favourite video paks. I especially enjoyed the detailing for the dashing, the game is definitely speedier and more hectic than anything from the era it evokes, and without sprite-flicker and slowdown. Though some of these effects can be turned on for added warm and fuzzies.
And ultimately, that’s the rub with Cyber Shadow – do you have nostalgia for the games that it apes? If so, you’ll probably be much better at it than me and like it more too. For me and other ninja novices out there, the game is fun and frustrating in unequal measure. You didn’t have to have been there, done that, and bought the promotional Dr. Pepper branded yoroi to get the good aspects of Cyber Shadow, but a case of Nintendo thumb and a history of Shatterhand-induced RSI will have you lurking in the cyber shadows in no time.
