Shadow of the Beast debuted in 1989 as an action-platformer for the Commodore Amiga, developed by Reflections and published by Psygnosis, famous for its multi-layered parallax scrolling backgrounds that were technically stunning at the time, even though its slow, punishing gameplay drew mixed opinions. This arcade version carries that same vision over to the coin-op format.
It's, above all, a piece valued for its aesthetics: rarely did atmosphere outweigh gameplay as much as in this title, and it's still cited as an example of how far late-80s visual design could go, whatever the debate over its mechanical design.
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