Montezuma’s Revenge: The 40th Anniversary Edition (PS5) Review

Gameplay

Graphics

Audio

Narrative

Summary: No amount of misty-eyed nostalgia can save this stinker of a remake.

2.3

Namesake

Montezuma’s Revenge was a game that I have fond memories of playing as a kid. That said, the game is more than 40 years old, and my memories are bleary at best.

It’s from that strange period of platformers in the before times, before Mario came along with his side-scrolling and sense of momentum and pace. When Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner were household names, and most platformers were more about collecting keys in a series of screens rather than running from one end of a level to the other.

To many, Montezuma’s Revenge remains one of the best early platformers, as intrepid adventurer Pedro attempts to navigate the treacherous temple of Montezuma by finding keys to open doors that let him move from the top of the pyramid to the bottom and hopefully escape — all while avoiding all kinds of traps, hazards, and ferocious beasts that inhabit the pyramid.

The problem is that times do certainly change, and gaming has come a long way since the halcyon days when you could get away with naming your game after unfortunate tummy troubles caused by some bad burritos.

It is impossible to overstate how important and game-changing console platformers like Super Mario Bros and Alex Kidd were to those of us who had been brought up with home computers that screamed at you for half an hour before giving you games made up of coloured bricks in a handful of colours, replete with renditions of classical music that sounded like they were made by kicking a printer down the stairs.

That leap from Montezuma’s Revenge on the Atari 2600 to Mario on the NES happened in the space of a year, and there’s been another 40 on top of that now. The fact of the matter is that modern games are so far removed from their forebears these days that any attempt to recreate them accurately without a documentary tacked on the side is a terrible idea, because they don’t hold up, and no amount of nostalgia is going to rectify that.

This is the problem at the heart of Montezuma’s Revenge: The 40th Anniversary Edition.

It plays almost the same as it did 41 years ago. That is to say, every last annoying quirk of platformers from that era is retained: the set jumping distance, the fall damage that kicks in at approximately two feet off the ground and kills you, the enemies that are everywhere and often impossible to avoid, who kill you instantly (unless you picked up a sword), and the ability to screw up your entire run because you unlocked the wrong-coloured door and there are no more keys left on the level.

Returning to Montezuma’s Revenge shows you how far we’ve come in terms of ironing out a lot of wrinkles in the way characters move, enemies behave, and how much of a pig games used to be to get through.

Poor Pedro is sadly not only trapped in the temple of Montezuma but in the past. What this game desperately needed was a proper overhaul to make it more playable for modern audiences.

That’s not to say there aren’t any quality-of-life improvements. You can toggle how many lives you have, enemies tend to disappear after they’ve killed you, and you can effectively brute force your way through the more onerous parts of the game thanks to it giving you infinite continues.

What really needed to happen, though, is for the fall damage to be a toggle in the options, for the platforming to be a little more forgiving in places, and for you to have been given some new, optional way to defend yourself. The inventory limit also needed to either be expanded or removed entirely (also optional). Then the old purists would have been happy, and so would anyone taking on the temple for the first time.

Which brings us to the presentation. Montezuma’s Revenge 40th Anniversary looks and sounds cheap. The best way to describe the horrible style of pre-rendered 3D sprites is that it looks just like the kind of awful CGI you find on an online gambling site. It has some serious Rainbow Riches vibes. The music extends to a single, completely forgettable looping track.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to feel nostalgic when you’re having a miserable time, and that’s what Montezuma’s Revenge – The 40th Anniversary Edition is. It’s just like its namesake. You can remember what you had to eat, and you’re sure you enjoyed it, but unfortunately, now that time has passed, your body is violently rejecting it.

You are better off just emulating the original because even though it still doesn’t hold up that well, at least it has some retro “isn’t it impressive what they pulled off with the hardware at the time” charm.

The worst part is that it’s a missed opportunity. The four developers who stuck their names on this thing honestly couldn’t figure out a way to do something fresh with the IP, or at the very least, use modern hardware to make Montezuma’s Revenge better in any meaningful way. At the very least, make it look good, sound good, give it more of a story, or tighten up the gameplay. Anything?

What we have instead may as well be flushed down the nearest toilet.

About the Author

Gareth Newnham

Montezuma’s Revenge: The 40th Anniversary Edition (PS5) Review