Sunman

About

Sunman was an unreleased action platformer meant for the NES that never saw the light of day. Developed by EIM and slated for Sunsoft in 1992, this project stayed off all magazine radars despite being mostly finished. You control a hero who moves like a typical beat em up from that era with running, jumping, punching, and ducking mechanics. The twist comes when you press up to fly instead of just hopping over gaps. The game features five distinct scenes containing four areas each, ending every section with a boss fight. Some stages shift into side scrolling flying levels where you shoot lasers from your eyes. What makes this title stand out is how it slipped under the radar completely while other cancelled games got months of hype before vanishing. It borrows heavily from Sunsoft's Batman titles but adds flight as a standard movement option rather than a special power up. The level design breaks down into manageable chunks with clear objectives at the end of each zone. Since no official release happened, there are no player ratings or community scores to reference. This lack of data just highlights how rare it is to find such a polished but ghosted project from the early nineties.