Pharaoh's Tomb (1990)

The man apparently misspelled his own name, which is something I've never seen before.

Name:Pharaoh's Tomb
Number:221
Year:1990
Publisher:Apogee Software
Developer:Micro F/X
Genre:Side-Scroller
Difficulty:5/5
Time:6 hours
Won:Yes (92W/71L)

There's something deeply unsettling about firing up a game and getting a jump sound effect that sounds like a fart.

Pharaoh's Tomb is another one of those games from the weird days of Apogee where everything is in CGA even though VGA is becoming a viable platform. It's also one I skipped over at first because I didn't know what exactly this was. Looking at the controls, I wonder if I wouldn't have been better off skipping it. Ctrl and Alt to move left and right? What the hell? It actually does have the arrow keys, but how bizarre.

The story is, you play as Nevada Smith, a research assistant to a professor of archaeology at a major university, who hopes to go on a treasure hunt soon, but the professor never brings you with, having you do research. Deciding against this treatment, you go off to the treasure hunt anyway, preventing your professor from doing so.

The first level is actually quite generous, you can go anywhere from the bottom, but you'll have to wait for the native to get out of the way.

I regret not playing this soon after Monuments of Mars, because I'm genuinely not sure what's new and what isn't. Both are games centered around a single screen a level, which I previously described as puzzlish design. Everything is block-based, including hit detection. Hope you weren't planning on cutting across some spikes, because even if you didn't touch it, because both blocks occupied the same space at the same time, you are dead. Oddly, parts of the game rely on some blocks not taking up a whole block.

What's weirder is that according to sources online is that not only is this not using the same engine as Monuments of Mars, it came out before it. I assume I had good reason to put Monuments in 1990. It's incredibly bizarre, did Replogle get inspired by this game, or did he come to the conclusion that this was somehow the way to design a platformer? Or some sort of strange forced consistency across products. I can believe that this was made before Monuments, since it certainly plays a lot worse.

This one gave me trouble starting out, but it was hard to see why in retrospect, since it isn't actually a cruel version of any of it's tricks.

Basically, Nevada walks, jumps awkwardly, two high and across, and can throw spears because having a gun would be too generous for this game. You can only carry five spears, and presumably five lives. Not that it matters since saving is unrestricted. There are also five masks, which you get a bonus for collecting five of. (I think) Collect 100 of the other thing and you get another life.

In addition to those things, you get keys, two different kinds, red and brown, which I didn't realize were different until I couldn't open one door. A freeze icon, which freezes traps and enemies, which can backfire. There are secrets, either you just naturally open some areas or reveal some platforms by walking somewhere, or you bump your head on a brick and get points. Sometimes the former is more obvious with a scroll which makes changes.

This level's big trick are the two enemies in the middle, otherwise it's completely straight-forward.

There are the requisite traps and enemies. Spikes, moving spikes, and a particularly nasty dart gun which is one black pixel on a normal wall. I have died several times to this. Enemies come in many flavors but they basically just move along certain lines, either on the ground or in the air. Not really enemies, we have moving blocks, which seem to stop if they'll hit you, and the occasional stage with a wind effect.

Getting back to the reason why I thought it would have been better to play this after Monuments of Mars, is that I genuinely don't know if I was in a really good mood for that, if my current personal issues are affecting my enjoyment of this game, or if this is genuinely worse. The collision in this game is so bad that I genuinely thought that you could walk on enemies for a few stages. Yeah, it's that bad.

This was probably my most hated level, since you have to dodge the darts while not really being in control of your movement thanks to the platforms.

The thing is that playing through these four episodes and I have no idea what Broussard was thinking when he placed levels where they are. The difficulty curve of this game feels poorly thought out. The first level is fairly simple, but the second suddenly requires you to start figuring out how enemy collision works. (These are the first two level screenshots) Your spears are limited, so wasting them is extremely unwise. You have to take advantage of the half-tile roof to jump over them, you have to watch out for dart guns and you have to figure out how to walk across sliding tiles.

The dart guns are a more obvious and non-obvious threat. They're obvious because as a threat they are constant, annoying and deadly. They're non-obvious because they are a single tile in otherwise normal-looking brick walls. I feel the need to reiterate this point because they were by far the most constant threat that killed me. Every level with them felt like a gotcha, and by golly this game has gotchas up the ass. They're very easy to miss, and often placed where if you don't notice them ahead of time you can die.

Half-tile roofs quality as the second nastiest hazard. It shouldn't, after all, you just get a half-tile more of ceiling, right? Yes and no, because the game really expects you to take advantage of these roofs to dodge enemies and dart guns. This trick was used so many times it was practically a guarantee that you'd see the two together. It sounds easy, but remember, collision in this game is awful, the controls stick sometimes. So even though you'll do it a hundred times, it's still risky.

Sliding tiles are interesting, from a technical perspective they're like the enemies, they go left and right on certain places, just not killing you. You can even see it in action when they collide with something, they go in the opposite direction. (You can do this with enemies sometimes, it's bizarrely merciful) But going across the tiles is tricky, you seem to have to fight against the movement of the tile if you go in the same direction it goes, and there's a small window of opportunity to get across something. Jumping up can be tricky because of the collision, but it's usually less dangerous than the simple over to another block sideways, more spikes below.

This one is completely straight-forward.

There's an important point to be gotten from these three things, the worst aspects of the game. It's all related to the collision. It's like if The Incredible Machine had its physics designed around screwing the player over as much as possible. Another common but not as nasty trick the game commonly has is a jump over two tiles of spikes, you basically go as far to the edge and jump, hoping to reach the other side. Platformers are allowed to have such strict jumping, but this game does it often and badly. Most bad platformers aren't so bad as to have such a bizarre platforming challenge and do it so often.

This feels like at complete odds with what should logically be the trouble with this game, something like the enemies or the spike elevators, as I took to calling them. They're basically something that only ever killed me because of something else, be it dodging a dart gun, the collision, again, or just plain carelessness on my part. Hey, I can't blame the game for everything! In particular, the spike elevators are weird, because you can touch the pole/rope that moves them, but not the piece itself, and there are very tight corridors.

I note that because I was back and forth on my two computers, I didn't do a good job of keeping my screenshots for this clear, so I used the level select cheat to take them. Hence the weird score.

I think the fundamental problem with this game is that it expects you to do things that the controls aren't really built for. Precision platforming is fine in Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia, it's not fine in a game that seems like it's barely holding together, and it's really not fine here. Because whenever I reached the end of some episode and had to grab a treasure, it didn't feel like the episode was ending as much as suddenly stopping like it was left off in the middle.

It ruins your subtle reference when you make it non-subtle...

Story begins and ends each episode, but even as far as excuse plots go, this feels unnecessary. "You are now in this part of the tomb", blah, blah, blah. Even the big ending cutscene which basically just tells you that your boss is Indiana Jones and that there's going to be another game, where Jones will take some credit on while you do all the work. Which I guess is fitting for an Indy-clone.

Weapons:
An awkward to use spear. 1/10

Enemies:
Obstacles rather than enemies, really. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
An inconsistent series of puzzles which requently require precision platforming. Some are okay, but far too often require performing difficult tasks with the game's controls. 3/10

Player Agency:
Every single bad thing I could say about controls I could say here. It sticks and it doesn't register at different times. It's loose and too tight. You have no control over the height of your jump, just the distance. Shooting doesn't work half the time. At least the save and pause functions work perfectly. 1/10

Interactivity:
None

Atmosphere:
It does feel fitting that a long forgotten pyramid feels miserable and desolate. 2/10

Graphics:
Simple, with decent animation. A point removed for the well-disguised dart gun. 2/10

Story:
Overly complicated for something that could be cut down to, find lost treasure. 0/10

Sound/Music:
You fart when you jump, and there are some other PC speaker effects. 1/10

That's 11. Which is the same as The Thor Trilogy. I think that's fitting. Both felt promising at the start, but both screwed themselves over by janky controls and poor level design. Both reminded me of better games. But I think there were times when I truly enjoyed myself playing Thor, whereas this is just sort of meh at it's best.

We'll see Journey to the Center of the Earth...I mean Arctic Adventure after Halloween, I want to alternate between Rejection and whatever it is I decide to play for October.