Review: Montezuma’s Revenge – 40th Anniversary Edition (Nintendo Switch)

I have no memory of playing Montezuma’s Revenge when it was released for various systems in 1984. I had access to two of those systems—the ColecoVision and Commodore 64—but I I didn’t have access to this game. Had I, I likely wouldn’t have taken on Montezuma’s Revenge – The 40th Anniversary Edition.

Or, maybe I did play it and simply repressed the memories. That would make sense, as this 2.5D platformer is brutally difficult. Not in a “just one more try” kind of way, but more of a “throw your controller into the TV” fashion.

Nearly every step of Montezuma’s Revenge is there to kill you, and there’s little to help you on your way. The goal is for Pedro (or the newly added Rosita) to explore an ancient tomb screen by agonizing screen—nearly 100 of them—in an effort to raid its treasures. But there is a lot in there to prevent your success.

Almost immediately, you’ll be dodging snakes, skulls, firepits, trap doors, and more, mostly without any aids. There’s not even a map to indicate where you’ve been. You can pick up weapons, yes, but only use them once before they’re gone (and they’re used by simply running into an enemy). Your inventory is severely limited, so deciding whether to carry the weapons you need to survive or the items you need to progress becomes a larger decision than it should be.

It’s actually a bigger help that when an enemy kills you, it dies, too. You wouldn’t think this would be a sound way to play a game, but with the unlimited restarts afforded to you in the 40th Anniversary Edition, it may be the only way.

Except that it’s not. Although the enemies are annoying from start to finish, they’re not as annoying as death-by-falling. What wouldn’t turn the ankles of Indiana Jones or Lara Croft are death sentences for these adventurous siblings. This tomb doesn’t need spikes or lava to claim its victims (although it has them), it just needs a drop of about five feet or more. And it has a lot to make sure you’re constantly falling. Conveyor belts, for example. The aforementioned trap doors. Bad physics.

Let’s focus on those physics for a minute. Neither Pedro nor Rosita seem to have any weight to them. They don’t so much walk through the tomb as glide. Jumping is heavy and clunky. Nothing about the way you move feels like it belongs in the game. You can hold down a button to “walk” if you want to slow yourself down, but doing so is rarely useful for navigating a hazard.

It doesn’t help that the game’s not much fun to look at, either. Yes, the visuals have been enhanced, but from the ’80s to maybe the mid-’90s. It has a Macromedia Director look to it that we’re all happy to leave in the past. Montezuma’s Revenge – The 40th Anniversary Edition somehow looks even more dated than the original.

I wouldn’t have thought that was possible, but it brings up an interesting conundrum. An 8-bit version of Montezuma’s Revenge is also available for the Switch. If you’re playing the game for nostalgic purposes, that’s the way to go. If, however, you’re playing because you never completed the game in any of its previous iterations, the 40th Anniversary Edition will actually give you the chance to do so. There’s some value to that, sure, but more effort with this version’s updates was needed to make that value worth it.