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[Important: Due to the "brightly-coloured, high-contrast, fast-moving, rapidly-flashing/flickering sprites", the creator has deemed the game "UNSUITABLE for anyone with a photosensitivity condition." Please bear this in mind before clicking the video linked embedded below.]
I wasn't alive during the ZX Spectrum's heyday; regardless, that hasn't stopped me from developing an appreciation for the iconic '80s microcomputer.
Maybe it's a symptom of some inert national pride (or the fact I have older brothers), but every time I see a game featuring the Speccy's unique colour capabilities, I feel an involuntary grin stretch across my face that would give even The Big Book of British Smiles a run for its money.
Understandably, then, when I saw the new ZX Spectrum homebrew Nightshift Skedaddle ZX earlier this week (thanks to the reporting of IndieRetroNews/Saberman), with its rather lovely-looking colours and its simple arcade-style gameplay, I immediately took a liking to it and wanted to take a closer look at the exciting release.
Nightshift Skedaddle ZX is a sequel to 2025's Scrapyard Skedaddle (also for the ZX Spectrum) and is perhaps best described as a Pac-Man-esque maze game. Players take control of a cat named Willow, who finds her biscuit factory infested with troublesome rats. With her inventory now spread across the different conveyor belts, it falls to the feline to gather up the missing stock, while avoiding the rats that are patrolling each floor.
The game is the work of the solo developer mavtherave, who was struck with the inspiration while working on the LOADING SCREEN for SSZX1. It is created using Jonathan Cauldwell's Multi-Platform Arcade Game Designer tool for 8-bit computers, and is available for free for 48K Spectrums, with the creator simply asking you to make a donation to a charity of your choosing (or the Motor Neurone Disease Association).
"As a graphic artist in my younger days, I once again began on paper before starting the MPAGD coding," wrote mavtherave in the game's development blog, "Which I challenged myself to do without any assistance this time. [Willow's movement was the only code partly carried over from the previous game, with a variety of changes to fit into the physics of the new playfield. Expert coder Mas's help from last year is therefore credited again in-game: THX Mas]."
They continued, "With the Spectrum's attribute clash, and without sprite-masking (or any coding skills for that matter, lol), the game I envisioned was quite a challenge to develop. Various solutions were needed to tackle the fact that multiple coloured characters would spend most of the game time overlapped with background ladders.
"Instead of the usual approach to spriteinks, a more memory-intensive way of setting colours was used, and various ladder layouts (some short, some partial, some single-step, all with very wide rungs) were carefully balanced against horizontal space to minimise both the (i) 'messy images' caused by XOR sprite+ladder overlap, and (ii) the flicker introduced by the colouring tricks. The results are, of course, very far from perfect, and apologies to anyone who finds the compromises I've made too distracting. I've tried my very best at it."
According to mavtherave, one of the major additions to the game, which is missing from its predecessor, is the magical item generator, which gives Willow blocks of cheese and rolling cookies to defend herself. This came about due to critical reviews of the first game that complained that "The cat needs a weapon", and was inspired by the item block from Super Mario Kart.
Want to give the game a spin? You can find the download here.