I imagine that in some far off living room in, say, Yellow Springs, Ohio, another child my age was flinging that same cartridge onto a pile of recently “solved” video games. I remember running to my father in despair, tears streaming down my face, as I declared to him that Super Kick-Off on the Mega Drive was too challenging for my mushy microcomputer muddled digits. When I think on the difficult games of my childhood, I remember plodding trial-and-error adventures featuring a fedora wearing, off-balanced egg or the cheating CPU in countless soccer simulations. It was far from Ryu Hayabusa’s ninja side stories that I was raised, shattered hands weren’t part of my youth, and happily, the only Blue Shadows I knew were from a song in The Three Amigos. A continuous stream of little failures and setbacks are an integral part of a game design that calls back to games I never played. When my son pushes a cup of milk onto the floor or when my dog drags mud onto the carpet or when I open the fridge to find that we are running out of milk.Ĭyber Shadow’s difficulty is tuned to take advantage of a particular Nintendo Entertainment System-honed muscle-memory. I’ve heard that scream so many times that I’m starting to hear it in my everyday life. When you die in Cyber Shadow you hear a voice-sampled scream. I realised that I was absolutely and unequivocally not the kind of person that Cyber Shadow was designed for, nor could I be. I quickly realised something terrible playing Cyber Shadow, a new throwback ninja platformer from Aarne “MekaSkull” Hunziker and Yacht Club Games. Platforms, Linux, Mac, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Switch, Windows, and Xbox One