Shackled

Shackled is a top-down run-and-gun game set in a vast underground dungeon complex. Your friends have been captured and chained up in cells, and your task is to navigate the maze-like levels to rescue them. The core objective is to explore each floor, find prisoners, and lead them to the exit while battling enemy guards. Keys must be collected to unlock doors, as shooting them has no effect . A distinctive mechanic is that when you free a prisoner, they will follow you and attack nearby enemies, and you can also make use of their special weapon to aid in your mission . The player can freely move and shoot in all directions, and can collect various weapons such as grenades and boomerangs, as well as items that grant faster movement or bonus points . The quest is long and treacherous, with over one hundred levels of dungeons to battle through . The game supports up to two players simultaneously.

Arcade

Released by Data East in December 1986, Shackled is the export version of the Japanese game Breywood, featuring a different attract mode . It represents Data East's answer to Atari's popular Gauntlet, adopting a similar top-down maze-shooter formula . The game runs on hardware powered by two M6809 main CPUs and a MOS Technology M6502 for sound duties, utilizing YM2203 and YM3526 sound chips . It displays horizontal raster graphics at a resolution of 256x240 pixels with a palette of 1024 colors . The arcade cabinet supports two players with an 8-way joystick and two buttons each . Polystar released a limited-edition soundtrack album for the game, titled Deco History Scene I, on September 25, 1988 .