Normally, I get a little tinge of excitement when I am handed a code from 8bitlegit. Historically, their games take me back to a simpler time when life wasn’t so challenging. Their releases give me premium doses of nostalgia that I have at least mostly enjoyed. It’s a nice little vacation from worrying about taxes, paying bills, or if my house is going to collapse within itself. Unfortunately, Dead Tomb has broken that streak.

If you hopped into your own personal Wayback machine and visited me in the summer of 1993, you’d probably find me sitting at my mother’s yard sale with a box of NES games that I was parting with due to my second NES dying and having recently upgraded to my personal favorite retro system, the Sega Genesis. Selling this box for a crisp twenty and a shriveled-up fiver is still one of my biggest regrets thirty years later, and if you happen to find a way to make it happen, smack my child self and tell him he’s an idiot because there were some certified bangers in that box that I could’ve easily made a house payment with in 2024. The thing is, none of them were what you’d consider to be a point-and-click or adventure game, or really anything close to what Dead Tomb is, so this didn’t tickle me in the nostalgia region like their other releases.

This title follows a space traveler who suffers a mechanical failure and lands in ancient Egypt. He seems to think it’ll be a quick fix but is quickly foiled by some Egyptian guards who knock him out and lock him in the depths of a pyramid. Your task is to find your way out. Sounds simple, right? Well, it’s not. Even for an 8-bit game.

Death awaits you at just about every corner, but not in a traditional way – you’ll navigate a series of rooms that usually have a handful of areas you can interact with, using one of many options that are available for each. Most of the actions will do nothing, usually giving you a generic message saying as such (I would’ve loved seeing more variety, even if the character didn’t actually do anything, such as responding to what a skeleton would taste like), but every once in awhile you’ll actually be able to interact with it, with a 50/50 shot of it being death. Pet a scorpion? Dead. Drink a random bottle? Three out of four cause death. Touch a statue? You probably guessed, but this time it was death by electrocution. The good news is that you can respawn instantly and infinitely. The bad news is that a lot of the word boxes with question marks signifying you can interact with something randomly appear with no obvious item being there to attract your attention to the area.

This became a problem for me in the fifth room, which houses a rope, a hook attached to the rope, and a trap door. It was obvious that I needed to get something to attach the rope to the door or something along those lines, but the path to that was extremely frustrating and left me consulting the walkthrough that accompanied the code after 30 minutes of testing every object I could find in all of the unlocked rooms. The solution didn’t make a lightbulb go off above my head, but it did point me in the right direction, and in an effort to put myself in the everyday regular consumer’s shoes, I put that walkthrough away and went back to it, only to be told that where I was directed wouldn’t work. At first.

You see, you have to attempt to pull out this nail a few times before it will work. As a male, I was raised with the mindset of “No means no,” so I took my first attempt as just that. After another thirty minutes, I pulled out that walkthrough again only to discover I had to try to pull out the nail multiple times. The rest of the game was a little more straightforward, but I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, or it even felt like anything less than work.

Aside from the puzzles, there isn’t much here in terms of gameplay, so if those are not your thing, I would steer clear from this release unless you are a diehard NES fan who is clamoring for a new-retro game because it does check all of those standard boxes off. It has the 8-bit visuals, decent stop motion cut scenes regularly, almost too regularly if you have to backtrack like I did, and catchy polyphonic tunes. There is also a handy password feature if you need to take a break; however, this isn’t something I caught onto until well into the game, so I feel like it could’ve been explained a little better.

From a modern perspective, the game is lacking a lot of the bells and whistles other retro or retro-ish games offer, which I get is a norm for 8bitlegit, but I still feel like it’s worth mentioning that adding the option for scan lines or a full-screen mode would’ve been nice, and I still wish they would figure out a way to add manual saves at a minimum to their current gen ports. As it stands, there is a fun retro-ish digital guidebook that almost looks like those found way back in the days of the NES cartridges, as well as the ability to change what borders the screen.

Dead Tomb isn’t a terrible NES tribute, but it isn’t one of the best out there either. I appreciate the effort put into being faithful to the 8-bit formula and also seeing Acclaim’s name appearing in the credits, as they were a standout brand from my childhood, but the gameplay didn’t live up to the pedigree for me.

5 out of 10

Pros

• Captures the Look and Feel of NES Releases
• Great Looking Cutscenes…

Cons

• Cutscenes Can Get Repetitive if Backtracking
• Lack of Player Direction
• Lack of Responses to Failed Actions

Dead Tomb was developed by CollectorVision Games/Acclaim and published by 8 Bit Legit. The game launched on NES, X1/SX and NS. The game was provided to us for review on XSX. If you’d like to see more of Dead Tomb, check out the official site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

Check out OpenCritic for a better idea of how our review stacks against others.

 

Check out OpenCritic for a better idea of how our review stacks against others.