I first played Cyber Shadow just about two years ago, at the last PAX I attended before the world ended. It was pretty good in 2019! Solo dev! Years of development! Handed off to Yacht Club to publish it! From-scratch faux 8-bit engine! All hand-drawn pixel art! Dude did everything except the music! It sounded like a kind of story that just doesn’t happen anymore, or when it does, it’s garbage and so obviously indie. In 2019 it felt like the most authentically 8-bit game I’d possibly ever played. Snappy controls, no hint that the intervening 30 years ever happened. Punishing, but fair.

Not like a demake, like the Mummy or the Bloodstained spinoffs from inti, or . . any of the tie-in games from inti, really. Not that there’s anything wrong about those games, but they lack something intangible that makes it really feel like a legitimate period 8-bit game. There’s usually some tell of some sort, like how the screens scroll, or a way-too-in-depth pause menu, or comprehensive collectible menus or something. Something that makes it feel off. Nothing feels off about this game except for achievements popping up, which seems to be a concession to ensure achievements worked across all platforms including Switch. If it wasn’t for that, this could just as well be Ninja Gaiden 4 or whatever.

From playing the demo two years back I built the impression that this was like Ninja Gaiden, but with equipment upgrades and backtracking to unlock previous things, but more like Mega Man X, not like a full on Metroidvania. Yeah that’s not it. There’s probably something like that kind of backtracking in the game, but it’s super super minimal and completely optional. Instead it’s just straight up Ninja Gaiden 4. And it Owns.

This game is HARD. “NES Hard” gets thrown around a lot, but here it is absolutely meant. Most of the time it’s a “fair” hard, where if you die you know why, it’s because you’re bad. Occasionally it is kaizo hard, where you died because you did what you thought would be right, but actually there are spikes there. And of course, most spikes in this game are insta-kill. But then there are totally some times where it’s just straight up unfair not-cool hard, where it’s asking you to do something that sucks, and you just have to figure it out. Knockback and iframes in particular are what comes to mind for that, the knockback in this game SUCKS. Knockback and instakill spikes all over the place BLOWS.

While I loved the game, in playing it I discovered that you can, in fact, build too true of an homage to an era of gaming. They dialed in the difficulty, the look, the feel, the powers, the bosses, etc. That’s all outstanding. What sucks is that the dev intentionally chose to stick to basically the constraints of an NES controller, with the only exception of one button for dashing.

My controller has 6 face buttons, two bumpers (when they work), two triggers, two clickable sticks, and two menu buttons (and also four paddles, but they don’t really count). Cyber Shadow has three things you can map. Jump. Attack. Dash (which is optional, it can also be double-tap direction). Everything else (shuriken, fire, dash, dash attack, and all charged versions of all of these) are all direction + attack. I just finished playing the hell out of The Messenger, and there I didn’t feel hamstrung by the controls. Here, it’s real bad, and the fact that I can’t move and star or move and attack up, or whatever was just . . real bad. It meant often I just didn’t do it. Not being able to attack up while in midair felt especially crappy.

…but it was still a really good game.