CMYW

I have a soft spot for the solo-dev origin story, and CMYW has one of the more quietly remarkable ones. Shane Berezowski, a mechanical engineer who was laid off in early 2015, taught himself GameMaker and shipped a four-player local co-op arcade shooter in roughly eight months. That context matters when you sit down with the game, because CMYW has the texture of something handcrafted for the love of it, not designed by committee. What you actually get is a vector-art space arena that owes an obvious debt to Asteroids. Each of up to four players pilots a tiny triangular ship colored Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, or White (hence the name). Asteroids fill the map, and destroying them drops ore pellets. You collect ore, deposit it at a central wormhole portal, and try to keep that portal alive as the threat level escalates. Difficulty curves upward in real time, bringing in an assortment of enemy types that Berezowski calls Bossteroids, each with distinct behavior patterns. Power-ups and weapon upgrades appear to keep you relevant against the rising tide. It is a short-session survival loop, the kind you measure in minutes, not hours. Online leaderboards are present if you want to compete beyond your living room. The tension at the heart of CMYW is genuinely smart: do you farm ore to feed the portal, or do you hold the line while your teammates gather? That resource-versus-defense split creates natural moments of co-op friction without requiring a word of tutorial text. In a four-player session it can produce the sort of frantic shouting that passes for good couch co-op communication. There is a single-player mode too, effectively a Cyan-only run for when your friends are not around, though the game was clearly designed for a crowd and solo sessions reveal how thin the loop feels without human chaos filling the gaps. The rough edges are real. Controller mapping has drawn criticism from players who found the ship rotation feel sluggish and unintuitive, and launch-era users reported compatibility hiccups on some Windows builds. The developer acknowledged in public forums that solo play-testing a four-player title presents obvious challenges, and that honesty is refreshing even if the bugs it produced are not. There is no online multiplayer mode, which is the game's single biggest structural limitation for anyone without three people nearby. In 2025 that is a harder ask than it was in 2015. For what it is, though, CMYW earns its place as a sincere, low-cost piece of arcade nostalgia. The vector aesthetic is clean, the loop is immediately legible, and the best moments arrive fast when the right group is in the room. I would not point someone toward it as a primary game purchase, but as a sub-five-dollar couch curiosity with a quietly human backstory, it holds a small and genuine charm that most budget titles simply do not bother with.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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