

Such power-ups can have an enormous effect on your chances of survival, but they are limited in how long they stick around. For example, destroying a collapsible wall may yield you a power-up that fires an energy blast every time you swing your sword. In addition to your katana, Shadow has a variety of limited-use power-ups and secondary tools that can help give him the edge in combat. Cyber Shadow is the sort of game that proves to be ridiculously simple on the surface – you merely have to run, jump, and slice your way through every level – but the intensity of the level design and the continuous introduction of new obstacles and enemy types keeps the experience from growing stale. Shadow has a trusty katana that dispatches most enemies in only a couple hits, and he must make use of his well-honed agility to dodge and jump his way through extensive gauntlets of cruelly-arranged obstacles. It’s not a story that’ll win any major awards, but this is also a narrative that has a little more depth to it than you may expect from a relatively simplistic game.įrom a gameplay perspective, Cyber Shadow draws most strongly from the classic trilogy of Ninja Gaiden games, as you’re tasked with going from level-to-level in a linear fashion while cutting down anything that gets in your way. Though the story is fittingly sparse (this is an 8-bit action platformer, after all) it’s rather striking how well it manages to set an effectively heavy tone as transhumanistic themes are explored over the ten-ish hour campaign.

Shadow is awoken in a bizarre and darkly technological setting and is tasked with piecing together what happened to his kin and how he can stop the grand threat that saw the fall of his clan and the world it existed in. The story sees you assuming the role of a ninja named Shadow, who stands as the last surviving member of an ancient order of ninjas.
