Yacht Club Games, the minds behind Shovel Knight, announced a new title the Wednesday night before PAX East started. This new title is known as Cyber Shadow, and it’s a classic NES Metroidvania style game that feels heavily inspired by the classic title Ninja Gaiden. This time Yacht Club Games is only the publisher, and the developer is Aarne “MekaSkull” Hunziker and Mechanical Head Studios. Although it’s another game in a classic genre, Cyber Shadow still feels all new and exciting:
After taking the whole weekend to find these guys, I managed to scope out the demo. And the demo is just as fun as how the trailer made it out to be. Getting the chance to play it, I realized that this was going to be A: a throwback to my old Megaman: Zero days on Game Boy Advance SP, and B: absolutely ridiculous. I was right.
The demo starts in the first chapter (1-1), learning the basics of how to play which came fairly easy. A lot of jumping, a lot of sliding down on walls, and a lot of slashing anything that wants to kill me. Getting closer to the end of the level, I’m told that there’s four members of my clan still alive, and that I have to find them. Then, soon enough, there’s a random boss encounter without warning. The way to figure out to kill him was easy enough, just a jump and slash a lot, and then gain a power-up that allows me to launch some fire into the air. Handy.
The second half of the demo is chapter 3-2. It’s much harder with a lot more enemies floating around and new enemies. But thanks to the handy dandy power up, it still required me to be precise with my moves, and I can shamefully admit that I died… quite a bit. But I wasn’t going to let myself down. This chapter was longer with the new moves, but also had introduced these stones that I could speak to that gave me information about the location of my clan, or the people behind all of this. And the boss fight for the end of this chapter? Much, much, much, harder.
This boss had several parts, the first part which was a lot of dodging and throwing fireballs into the air to get his health low. Then the second part brought us down to ground level, and I had to wait for him to get stuck after a strong strike before attacking. Again, it took a few tries, but it was well worth it.
As I mentioned, I expected the game to bring me back to old style gaming, and it did. Mechanical Head Studios proved that it put in a lot of effort and thought into creating this new title. The demo only showed a glimpse into how the levels play out, but given the trailer and some of the talking stones along the way, there’s bound to be more of an intense story than expected. While PAX East is coming to a close, it’s worth following and checking out the website for it.
Cyber Shadow is due out soon and will be available for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. It is currently up for pre-order for $14.99 USD.