Being a vintage gamer, it has been fun to see the slew of remasters and reboots of many of the franchises I’ve enjoyed over the years. The opportunity to revisit classics in some form is always fun, though typically the games that have gotten that treatment have tended to be from the last 20 years or so, not the far more substantial 40. Oddly enough, I actually have fond memories of getting Montezuma’s Revenge for the Atari 5200 way back in the day, so when I saw this announced I was fascinated to see how it would turn out. Overall, I’d chalk this up to a case of sometimes it’s better not to revisit games from your earlier days.

For those who didn’t know, I’d say the best description of the original’s gameplay would be as an evolution of something like Pitfall, though that describes the general style more than the format. You’d explore a pyramid, trying to make precise jumps to grab keys and loot, while jumping and dodging a fair number of traps, snakes, and bouncing skulls. In practice this worked out to be a mix of puzzle and action since colored keys would demand that you go to a particular area to get what you needed to unlock doors in another room, with some requiring you to complete a sequence of tasks in different rooms to be successful. While a bit simpler by more modern standards, the game was also fairly difficult and picky about jumps at times, so it was a title I played a fair amount of but don’t remember even remotely finishing.

This 40th Anniversary Edition does manage, most of all, to walk the difficult tightrope between honoring the original game’s general look and design, while also making it far more complete with new challenges, rooms, and even additional opportunities to score higher within the original areas. It was really a treat to remember some of the key layouts still after so many years, so for me there was an added element of nostalgia that was nice. That said, there are definitely some new problems to add to the old as well. I remember the original game could be really picky about what sort of falls would cause you to die, and I can’t say I was thrilled some of that was preserved. There are plenty of legitimate clear ways to die, so falling into a small plain pit that looks like you could easily jump back out of taking your life just feels pointlessly excessive. 

A bigger issue is that the 2.5D look doesn’t always work out well, as some of the new textures in the background and foreground can make it difficult to tell where you can walk and where you can’t in some rooms. In general there’s just a certain wonky quality to how you interact with things at times as well that may have been normal way back when, but now feels like they should have been smoothed over. If you remember the original, or are just interested in somewhat more obscure games from yesteryear this may work well on a sale, but for everyone else it’s likely not going to be of much interest