Cyber Shadow - Retro Game with Retro Challenges

Imagine the sun tickling your eyes through your eyelids. Outside the window, the swallows are singing their spring song. The daylight has gently lifted you out of your reverie, not torn your consciousness from its roots, as the alarm clock does five days a week. Let's say more: you haven't yet tasted that pleasure of adulthood.

When you wake up, you stretch out in bed. Your feet don't rest against the bedposts, and the bed itself seems so spacious. The aroma of your mother's pancakes wafts in from the kitchen, and the new season of The Simpsons is on TV. As you're getting ready for school, you've packed your briefcase, finished your pancakes, but you still haven't finished watching The Simpsons. The series ends just in time for the start of first period. Next up is the road to school. Nothing remarkable in the moment, but such a kaleidoscope of colors in the memories. Kindergarten fences, lawns, the school's entrance hall. The security guard again demands a change of shoes, which you, of course, forgot, because Homer has done something stupid again...

The weightiest problem in life - the whole five classes and subbotnik. But no problem! From the fifth period you tactfully left, to come home early and appreciate the new episode of the program "terribly interesting. On the table beside the bubbly TV of yesteryear is a Game NES, a pile of cartridges, and a couple of broken gamepads. In real life, the gamepads looked something like this, but they were wired:

But in your memory they are imprinted like this:

Your muscle memory still remembers that the crossbar was tighter than an expansion joint, and you could cut your finger on the "Select" and "Start" buttons. But pressing "B", "A", "TB" and "TB" was a pleasure. The feedback from the diaphragm... I can't put it into words...

...And then you wake up. The alarm clock savagely ripped you out of your sweet sleep, and when you stretch out in bed, your feet rest against your headboard, something crunches in your back. There were no more pancakes in the kitchen, but the refrigerator was full of more expensive food. More expensive, but not tastier.

Instead of school, there is now work, instead of grades there are salaries, and instead of vacations there are vacations. The excuse "I'm sick" doesn't work anymore. Parents might believe these fables, but not the boss. Eight hours a day, five days a week, maybe a couple of weeks off, and credit are now your trusty "friends."

What's up. Adult life isn't as cool as it seemed twenty years ago? Having achieved success, you look back on the past and realize that fate has paid for all those hustles sparingly...? Can you feel that eye pain? It is the pink splinters of shattered cornea that stabbed into your eye....

Cyber Shadow is the kind of game that tries to replicate the feelings described in this article to the line of three impressive gaps. But unlike many other eight-bit knockoffs, Cyber Shadow doesn't give the illusion of a retro game. Cyber Shadow is an NES game in every sense. And you have to hand it to the game, only Cyber Shadow managed to debunk the cult of nostalgic snot. The grass was always the same color.

Was it better before...?

The holy cult of retro games is indestructible. It would seem that there is no greater sin in the world than to criticize all sorts of Contra 4 or Battletoads. However, these games originated in the days of arcade games, where for a coin they gave monstrously little time to get acquainted with the game. To keep the player from passing the game and losing interest in it, the developers made the games tooth and nail hardcore. But this is not the hardcore that we are used to. These days, hard games are those where the player is given a very narrow corridor of options, and is beaten desperately for mistakes. But at the same time opponents have readable mobsets, items often have descriptions, and training and let's chew up all the mechanics, but at least teaches the basics: what buttons to walk on, how to interact with the world and what the value of the game. All of this was not present in the games of the eighties. Every game had to be literally learned by heart.

Errors made by game designers of that era have already become a meme. The chase mission in Battletoads was a living hell. The developers of that era always thought in their universe, when the player had to figure out the only correct algorithm of passing. There's even a duology of games that harshly mocks that M.O. The name of that game is The Underground Man. I recommend it, don't play it.

Cyber Shadow is a game by a loner developer named Aarne Hunziker. Aarne went to great lengths to make his game feel and play like the games of the eighties. Simple backdrops, eight-bit music, responsive keys, recognizable enemy behavior patterns, and leveldesign. All of these components are as if they have been asleep in anabiosis for forty years and only recently escaped from the cryogenic chamber. Cyber Shadow's storyline also seems to have escaped from the cryogenic chamber... And the game's protagonist himself. In those years, the plot plot was fit into two sentences, and so it is here: the player takes control of a ninja named Shadow. Shadow's clan is defeated by aliens. Shadow has lost his body and sets out to fight the alien invaders.

No double-two, no unexpected plot twists. The Shadow has point A and point B, and that's it. There are eight levels ahead and thousands of attempts to get through them.

To further immerse your player in that era, Aarne even tried to work on the functional filters. In the menu, you can turn on a filter that simulates a fading TV, making the image less clear.

Authenticity grows many times over after such settings are enabled. In addition, all levels are lined up exactly as they were back then. This tooth-crushing platforming, which requires the player to be surgically accurate...

For hours on end, the players of that time were jumping on the same platforms, hoping that this time they wouldn't hit a pixel on the screen and fall down at the beginning of the level. Cyber Shadow make a small indulgence: here there is an opportunity to save, and not to start the level again after the death of the protagonist. But it does not get easier from this...

Checkpoints are placed so far from each other that after each death have to languid minutes to overcome the same fresh areas. Remember how in the games of the eighties the protagonist was stunned by the damage he received and threw him back a bit? Cyber Shadow hasn't forgotten that. As well as the fact that any touching the enemy does damage to the protagonist. Hardcore? Well, well, well.

And remember those same spikes that instantly sent you to the loading screen when you touched them. Remember squeezing your NES console gamepad to your white knuckles and yelling, "I pressed it!"? Cyber Shadow cracked open that wound, reminded you of that pain. Some even enjoyed this kind of overpowering. But the context is important...

...In the days of the popular NES, cartridges were a luxury for many. Swapping one game for another was a small event. You had to play what you had. Through the pain and suffering went through "that damn level" and enjoyed it further. Now there is no shortage of choice of games. On one side of the scale there are thousands of games for every taste and color. And at the other end of the scale is Cyber Shadow, affectionately playing on nostalgia. And spikes, on which the player will perish...

Dying...

...And then die again.

Repeat until you have passed the level. Until you hit all the keys in the right order. It's like playing the piano, but instead of a notebook of notes, you see an eight-bit mush in front of you. Cyber Shadow could be used as torture or as an alternative to capital punishment...

The controls, hitboxes, and boss battles would drive anyone to the brink...

Do you know what the main difficulty of Cyber Shadow is? Let's start from afar. Some games carefully recommend using a gamepad. They say the controls are better optimized for the controller, but it's still possible to play with a keyboard and mouse. Cyber Shadow is the first game that is not only not optimized for keyboard and mouse. With these devices this masterpiece is not playable at all. It's unknown whether Aarne intentionally made the key response monstrously sour, but it didn't do the game any good.

The game doesn't accept a computer mouse at all, but that's half the trouble. Worse, it's not uncommon for the protagonist to be attacked from two sides by opponents, and the parry, run and walk buttons are assigned to one button - inevitably you take damage. Why? Because the game wanted it that way...

At first, you won't notice the catch. At first The Shadow can only walk, low jump and hit in one direction. Opponents are spread out so that the Achilles' heel remains in the shadows. That weakness is tiny hitboxes. The shadow is a cybernetic ninja who can't...crouch. The injustice of how the damage here counts makes you want to scream and tear your clothes off. In the screenshot below, The Shadow tries to punch, but...

Doesn't hit at point-blank range, because the protagonist's model is not on the same level as the opponent's model - the damage is not counted. But this is an example with a straightforward opponent. The NES era has another curse in store - damn flying enemies. And this is where Cyber Shadow stands out: local mosquitoes fly through walls, through textures, sometimes on a curved trajectory and at high speeds.

But Aarne didn't think flying enemies were annoying enough, so the local flying enemies multiply after death. Once you kill one big, slow-moving mosquito, you get two more fast ones. Except that both big and small flying enemies do a lot of damage and can send you to the loading screen as fast as the local bosses. Speaking of which...

The bosses in Cyber Shadow are the only ambiguous thing about the game. The battles themselves are built exactly like the boss battles of forty years ago. Bosses don't swing around for half an hour, no warning marker pops up on the screen before they hit, and it's not easy to dodge projctiles, but it's possible. Some bosses introduce new mechanics, some echo the classic video game tone, but most importantly, all bosses are challenging.

On the other hand, the time corridor for dealing damage is very narrow. All fights consist of dodging numerous attacks, jumps, and a couple of seconds of combat. In the best tradition - the bosses do not have a health bar, which makes the battles always tense. And the victories are unexpected.

Is Cyber Shadow worth buying?

Only if you want to thank Aarne Hunziker for his labors. The guy really tried and made as bad a game as they were in the past. It takes talent to do well, and it takes talent to deliberately do terrible. But if you're on the lookout for a retro game and want to get nostalgic and have fun, don't touch Cyber Shadow. This game will destroy you not by its hardcoreness, but by its curvature.