Video games: Three throwbacks to the arcade age
Cyber Shadow
“There’s a fine line between challenging games and frustrating ones,” said Austen Goslin in Polygon.com. In the mid-1980s, 2D arcade-style platformer games such as Metroid, Castlevania, Megaman, and Ninja Gaiden “didn’t seem to care whether you enjoyed them.” Instead, they “found charm in making you stick around through each punishing death.” This new 8-bit platformer honors the legacy of those “ultradifficult” Nintendo classics, but it also manages to be “approachable and fair.” Playing as a cyborg ninja, you make your way through the apocalyptic ruins of a futuristic city, slicing through robots and uncovering clues about what’s befallen the rest of your ninja clan. “Despite its retro style, Cyber Shadow never feels old.” The tight control it gives you over your ninja’s fluid movements “proves that with a few smart, modern twists, it’s possible to make a retrostyle platformer with all the difficulty of the past, and few of the frustrations.” Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox
Carrion
Carrion is the rare game that lets you revel in being the monster, said John Walker in
Kotaku.com. In this “wonderfully macabre and grotesque” twist on traditional Metroid- and Castlevania-style platformers, you play as an amorphous, tentacled beast that rampages through an underground research facility. Your pixelated creature’s bloody, dripping biomass of tendrils and teeth continues to grow as you crawl and slide from room to room with “sublime and revolting grace,” devouring all of the well-armed humans in your path. “You feel so villainous, so evil, so intensely bad.” Carrion is “much more than just the gore,” though, beginning with its “finely crafted” puzzles and “haunting, malevolent” soundtrack. “But, ho boy, the gore.” Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox One
Spelunky 2
Don’t let the cute, cartoon look of this platformer fool you, said Mitchell Saltzman in IGN.com. Like its predecessor, a 2008 cult classic, Spelunky 2 is a seemingly simple yet “brutally difficult” 2D platformer in which every 16-bit backdrop is randomly generated. As a result, you have to improvise as you go. You play as a treasure-collecting cave diver who must get from point A to point B while dodging snakes, bats, spiders, ghosts, spike traps, falling boulders, “and approximately 999 other ways to die horribly.” Because you need to read the room quickly in order to survive, it’s “exceptionally satisfying” when you do make progress in Spelunky 2. “Yes, it’s often hilariously difficult, but if you can learn enough of its secrets to push through that, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a game as consistently rewarding and endlessly engaging.” PlayStation 4 and PC; coming to Nintendo Switch this summer