“Yars Rising boldly takes an Atari 2600 classic into the future with ingenious results.”
- Respectful of the Yars legacy
- Loaded with style
- Economical adventure design
- Genius throwback minigames
- Hacky humor
- Simplistic combat
- Messy traversal skills
What is the best way to honor a classic video game’s past? Is it enough to port an old Atari game to each new platform? Is an HD remaster or flashy remake enough? Those are all fine options that publishers seem eager to pursue in our nostalgia-driven phase of gaming history, but they’re all approaches strictly focused on spotlighting the past. How does one not just honor a legacy, but carry it into the future at the same time?
Leave it to a studio like the aptly names WayForward to crack the code with Yars Rising. The new Metroidvania is a modern reimagining of Yars’ Revenge, one of the Atari 2600’s greatest games. Rather than simply polishing an old space shooter up, Yars Rising turns the series into something else entirely. It may look alien at first, but the 2D action adventure pays tribute to a foundational game in a surprisingly respectful, transformative manner guided by the series’ long history.
Though its economical Metroidvania design has its pros and cons, Yars Rising should be a new blueprint on how to revive retro games without only relying on nostalgia as a crutch. It’s a bold reimagining that has two legs to stand on and four wings to carry it forward.
Past and present
In the original Yars’ Revenge for the Atari 2600, players controlled an insectoid character at war with alien ships. They could nibble away at the shields surrounding their foe on the other side of the screen and then fire at the ship behind it with a Zorlon Cannon shot. It’s an elegant piece of retro design that did something entirely different with the popular space shooters of the era. That’s a difficult appeal to translate to audiences in 2024. So instead, developer WayForward gets creative.
Yars Rising blows that simple idea out into a full Metroidvania with side-scroller shooting, sneaky stealth, and hacking puzzles. That may sound entirely disconnected from the source material at first, but the connections reveal themselves the deeper the adventure goes on. Its story, for instance, begins as when a blue-haired hacker named Emi (code name: Yars) gets called to infiltrate an evil corporation. That soon sets the stage for a light espionage tale that weaves into an alien invasion conspiracy. It’s entirely in the spirit of Yars’ Revenge, taking the pieces of its lore and crafting them into something more fully realized.
The callbacks aren’t always explicit, but they’re cleverly threaded throughout. The original Yars’ Revenge came bundled with a brightly colored comic book setting up its alien conflict. Yars Rising nods to that with both its own vibrant art style and motion comic cutscenes that act as a fun reference for hardcore fans. It has the narrative energy of a classic Atari game, but mixed with some modern influences of its own.
What’s impressive is how well WayForward lands that tricky balance. It takes the hard sci-fi of the original and puts it in the context of a bright 1990s anime, complete with bubble voice acting and quippy gags (your mileage will vary on its hammy, though well-delivered jokes). Its earworm soundtrack trades in the triumphant music of its old Kid Stuff Records companion cassette for jazzy pop jams that wouldn’t feel out of place in Persona. It’s a respectful fusion of past and present, with WayForward’s own creative stamp holding it all together.
Economical Metroidvania
The stylistic balancing act extends to Yars Rising’s gameplay, which takes some even bolder creative liberties with the series. It’s a 2D action adventure very much in the vein of Metroid. Simple combat just has Emi blasting her cannon forward and shooting the occasional missile, while exploration has her crawling through vents and dodging laser grids. She gets a few traversal powers along the way, like a wall jump and air dash, but WayForward keeps everything simple. It has the economical design of a Game Boy Advance game, which makes for a breezy adventure. That’s something that WayForward excels at, as seen in gems like The Mummy Demastered.
Sometimes it can feel a bit too stripped down. Shooting is a bare-bones combat hook that doesn’t really change, while rigid stealth sections force players to wait for guards to walk back and forth on their set path or else be instantly taken down by one shot if they’re alerted. Traversal gimmicks can feel sloppy too, like its frustratingly sluggish underwater movement or an upwards burst that’s a bit unwieldy. If you’re looking for a genre game as sprawling or complex as Hollow Knight, you’re in the wrong place.
That sleek design is a gift in other spots. Yars Rising keeps its map small and easy to navigate, making its secret hunting less daunting. Every unexplored path is clearly marked on my map and highlighted in red if it’s not accessible yet. I completed the game at 100% in about nine hours and there was very little fat on that, even if it meant for a fair amount of visual repetition as I navigated the same few areas multiple times.
It helps that the rewards for exploration all feel worthwhile. Rather than hiding missile expansions or health upgrades throughout the world, Emi instead collects equippable mods that alter her abilities. Each one is represented as a set of Tetris-like blocks that can be slotted into a pixel art grid that looks like the insect hero from Yars’ Revenge (another cute nod to the series history). It’s an inventory puzzle game where I need to figure out how to fit as many pieces in as possible while still boosting stats like my shot power or air dash distance. It’s the rare Metroidvania where I felt driven to explore every single corner of it; I just never knew what helpful bonus might be waiting behind a tricky platforming puzzle.
Retro puzzles
While the connections to the Atari game may only sound like pixelated lip service so far, Yars Rising’s creative spirit comes through in its hacking puzzles. Throughout the adventure, Emi must break into computers to unlock doors and get new chips. Each one has its own timed minigame modeled after Yars’ Revenge and its retro space shooting gameplay. I need to nibble shields, blast Qotiles, and avoid deadly swirls just like in the original. At first, it’s a cutely nostalgic throwback. Shortly after, it becomes the most compelling hook in the entire game.
Each hacking challenge gets increasingly more complex as it plays with the core concepts of Yars. One has me nibbling away at heart shapes as I dodge missiles that fall like rain. Another has me biting through one side of an enemy shield so I can charge up my Zorlon Cannon on the other side of the screen and fire it into the metal shield on my foe’s backside. They even get referential to other Atari games, with nods to Centipede, Missile Command, and more. Each one is a bite-sized challenge that highlights just how elegant games like Yars’ Revenge are. They’re as much a reward as the secrets hiding behind them as each one gets added to a minigame collection, where they can be replayed.
That inventive interplay between 2D action and classic space shooting is what makes Yars Rising feel so special. Atari has spent the past few years trying to find the right way to make its old properties relevant again. Titles like Lunar Lander Beyond teased out what makes their predecessors unique while expanding on those strengths, but Yars Rising really gets the assignment. WayForward builds a wider world around the series’ premise that goes beyond the confines of one single screen, all while making the original game a diegetic part of that universe. It’s both nostalgic and modern, where Easter egg references transform into a genre-changing hook that makes the adventure stand out among its more mechanically complex peers.
Worthy of the Yars name
I hope that Yars Rising serves as a blueprint for Atari moving forward. Heck, I hope any publisher struggling to keep a series as old as Yars fresh is paying attention. Yars Rising is a loving ode to the past that reveres its source material enough to confidently expand on it rather than give it an easy refresh. It takes the original franchise’s worldbuilding seriously and finds a way to twist every morsel of it into a larger adventure that’s worthy of the Yars name. Sometimes the best way to keep the past alive is to let it evolve into something new. Precious nostalgia is an anchor, and Yars Rising flies free without that tying it down.
Yars Rising was tested on PC and Steam Deck OLED.
