[PAX East 2019] Cyber Shadow aims to capture a nostalgic mix of the best NES action games

Teaching an old dog old tricks.

I am 40 damned years old, and I have absolutely fond memories of my time playing NES games. But, whenever I go back to them, the majority don’t hold up the same. Perhaps it was my happiness just to have a new game (any game) as a 9 year old that I didn’t care or know how bad it really was. Perhaps it was that because gaming was still in its early days we were far more accepting of what wold now be glaring issues. I can’t pinpoint it, but what I *do* know is that satisfying feeling will always be there buried in my head. Yacht Club Games knows this, and their latest project, Cyber Shadow, continues to capitalize on the phenomena.

The game has been developed by a one man team, Aarne Hunziker (going by Mechanical Head Studios), over the last 7 years. It’s gone through both minor and major overhauls, reboots, and tweaks. It’s finally in the polish stages, and the PAX East demo proves it.

Styled in an 8-bit aesthetic, Hunziker developed Cyber Shadow based on his love for those classic NES action platformers like Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania, where every pixel is important, not just for looks. In fact, he picked up development first by retro-engineering ROMs of older games, adding new and bizarre features for the heck of it, like changing powerups in one game to cigarettes that would cause lead characters to pause and exhibit funny smoking animations. Being so knee deep in those older games prepared him for developing Cyber Shadow. Of course we have a vast supply of new toolsets to mess around with these days, but the focus of the game isn’t glitz and glamour, but perfection of the early days of the genre. The game is smooth, super smooth, buttery smooth, with beautiful animation that flows at optimal framerates. The lead character is 3 pixel blocks tall. The worlds are expertly designed and the bosses are giant and menacing, and the mix of futurism, cyber punk, and Olde Japan work well together.

So, when I grab the controller and start to play the game, my memories of the genre instantly roar back. I already know how to play it without ever having a tutorial. I run across the world, ducking behind walls and jumping up to slash a projectile-hurling tower. I don’t move down platform to platform, I snake between them in a fluid drop. When I need to cross a ravine to get to another point, I let myself hang off the ledge from my toe, shifting over pixel by pixel until I’m confident that I won’t fall to my death. And when I face off against the PAX demo’s giant boss, my years of pattern recognition serve me well, allowing me to attack, dodge, and fire back in a consistent rhythm.

I’ve never played this game, but I know I have. Cyber Shadow takes not just the best elements of some of the NES classics, but also the quirks that add the actual flavor to how we played.

Cyber Shadow aims to hit our controllers later this year.