10-year-old me never designed a game, but if I did there's a good chance it would look somewhat like Shadow of the Beast. Plenty of cool ideas, unique enemies, enemy formations and level hazards, but they're all strung together haphazardly with little regard for balance or flow - it really does feel like someone with ADHD just designed a whole lot of unique monsters, strung together a bunch of "wouldn't it be cool if-" moments and called it a day.

Shadow of the Beast's most infamous quality is probably its difficulty, and for good reason. Many handheld games had worse screen crunch, games like Secret of Evermore had worse hit detection, and Strider in its worst moments had far more hazards onscreen at once - but this game put all those frustrating elements together on top of giving the player a grand total of zero continues. I'll admit to using the invincibility cheat, without which I would never have made it past the penultimate level - a shmup stage made way harder than it should be by your vertically-oriented hurtbox.

Perhaps the game's most offputting quirk is how it handles its non-linearity. There are certain items (keys, a wrench, a torch, etc.) you need to pick up in order to make progress, but the game is buggy enough that doing things out of order will glitch the game out and softlock you. This turns dead ends into literal dead ends and leaves basically no room for deviation or exploration.

The game's graphics, cool soundtrack and surprisingly smooth controls save it from a lower score, but it's definitely one of the weaker-designed platformers from the era.