I am someone who is quite familiar with the field of retro gaming before the NES, so I at least knew about Yars Revenge before this game, I didn’t fully understand just what it was I was looking at, but I knew of its reputation of being that other game made by the same guy who would go on to be forced to make ET for the Atari 2600 before everything went belly up in the industry. Flash forward to today, and we have homage/reboot of sorts of the property brought to us by Wayforward the Shante & Ducktales Remastered people, in the form of a 2D MetroidVania with the art style of a motion webcomic that you would find while scrolling on TikTok. That being said, after playing it, it does have some good ideas attached to it, but that goodwill can’t outweigh the issues I had with the game, mainly with the story and characters that are present, along with some gameplay issues.
You play as Emi Kimura, a young hacker, who is hired by a shady group to infiltrate the secret “cyberpunk” like corporation QoTech and find out what dark and dirty secrets they have hidden within their walls. I’ll start with the positives, I do like how we are an everyday nobody at the start, I was getting the impression that we were hired for this job and didn’t know the full scale, and I did like the arc that she went on through the game. Then she started talking, and it got annoying quickly; if you are someone who has grown tired of the MCU-style Joss Whedon joke at the end of every single sentence, then you will likely find the dialogue here to be annoying throughout its 5 hours of gameplay. I quickly ended up turning the VO off 30 minutes in because while trying to dodge all of the projectiles in the room and having to hear quip after quip while I was getting shot and messing up my flow, I started to think the game was against me at that point. You also have other characters present, and I barely remember a single one; they all felt like they were there just to fit an audience archetype.
Then you have the gameplay, which is fun and smooth in the moment, and the controller-biting frustrating the next. It’s from the Shante devs, so I expected some good level design here, and for the most part, I did; only rarely did I reach a point where I needed to backtrack because the game didn’t block this area of for me, but instead of walking back this dead-end gave me a fast travel point, so at least the designers knew players would go down this optional route. Then you have the hacking minigame, which is the USP of the game and where the connection to the original Yars comes into play. So, you know all those classic Atari made 2600 games, they are here in the form of bit sizes hacking games. It was interesting, to say the least, at first, seeing how this is the only way you can convince someone in 2024 to play the 2600 version of Centipede. It was exciting to see which game they would grab next in the hacking games; however, it’s limited to games from the arcade era, so for the 5 people who grew up with a 2600 and played this game, sorry to disappoint you.
I was more excited to see the next hacking game than traversing the mediocre platforming, where at times, like I said, it is fun and reminds me of playing the recent Shante games, and also, at times, can glitch up and instant kill you and make you restart the room again. The most notorious of these is the forced stealth sections, which has two modes: caught and stealth, meaning the moment you are spotted, all the killed enemies in the room know where you are and shoot you on the spot. It gets frustrating when you have to hide in the shadows and avoid the guards and lasers while also shooting down the enemies that you can shoot down, then you get caught once and have to redo the room over again. Then near the end of the game, I had a game crashing bug, that anytime I would get caught, the game would crash and sending me back to my last save point; this was when I was tempted to look up the ending on YouTube but was able to press on through for the last thirty minutes.
So, in the end, should you give this game a chance? It’s a great love letter and time capsule for some of the most obscure games from the early 80s that translates them for a modern audience as best as they could have. But on the other side of the coin, it’s a mediocre MetroidVania with a style that blends together with other games in the indie space at the moment. But the main thing, I won’t remember much once the week has past, and the game has left my Mindspace; it’s a could idea to preserve elements of gaming history, but then you start to ask the question, would I rather have a game surround those historical elements, or just buy a compilation or virtual museum collection instead to get straight to them, and for me, I would go with the latter.
Score: 5 out of 10
Reviewed on PlayStation 5