Sydney Hunter And The Curse of the Mayan Review

As Retro As It Gets

HIGH Spotting the ‘falling’ screen from The Adventure of Link.

LOW Literally every boss.

WTF They decided to put the Smurfs game in this?

It’s rare that a company boldly states its design goals via its name, but that’s just what CollectorVision Games has done with Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan. By explicitly referencing the second generation Coleco console in their name, the developers make an implicit pledge about their content — ostensibly, this is going to be an old-school experience in every sense of the term, including crude graphics, awkward controls and punishing difficulty.

Set in an expansive temple complex, this 2D platformer tasks the player with defeating an evil snake god and reassembling the Mayan calendar before its absence causes time itself to stop. Accomplishing this requires pixel-perfect platforming, scouring levels for hidden areas, and overcoming some of the worst boss fights I’ve seen in years.

Movement here is a chore but I find myself hesitant to criticize it, since it’s obviously supposed to be that way. The developers are attempting to recreate a specific game feel, and they’ve succeeded with flying colors as the titular Sydney lumbers awkwardly around and makes big, floaty leaps that are frustrating to control. The developers could have made everything tight and responsive — their brilliant recreation of ColecoVision’s truly awful Smurfs Adventure proves that they’re adept at changing up control schemes as necessary — but here the bad controls are the point. The player is supposed to get angry when they’re absolutely sure they should have made a jump. More than once I was tempted to throw a controller, and the only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that if I did, I’d be giving the developers exactly what they wanted.

Sydney Hunter‘s graphics are an incredible example of making the player feel like they’re looking at something more primitive than they actually are. The limited color palette and crude sprites create the impression of artists working under extreme technical limitations, but it never suffers from the actual performance hitches its inspirations did. Large numbers of enemies can be onscreen at once without the framerate getting choppy, and there’s an impressively large variety of enemies packed in, ensuring that each of the dungeons offers fresh, new dangers.

Another extremely modern aspect is just how deep it is. In addition to the basic running, jumping and attacking, the player has to track down a dozen different artifacts, each one powering them up one way or another. There’s equipment to let them travel and fight underwater, to identify and destroy secret blocks, and even a bird sidekick to deal with tiny, quick-moving foes. While it’s not quite a metroidvania, Sydney has plenty of rewards on offer for a player willing to go back to past dungeons after earning a new ability.

This is all solid work, but the one place where the developers have thoroughly dropped the ball — other than ladders, which have to be jumped onto, for some reason — are the bosses.

It’s truly baffling how out-of-step every boss fight is. On some level the issue is that Coleco-era games didn’t have ‘boss fights’ per se — that didn’t really become a thing until the NES — so their presence here seems odd. Beyond the faux anachronism, though, is the design of boss abilities. They’re universally able to zip freely around arenas while bumping into Sydney for one heart’s worth of health, or they fill the screen with a bullet hell’s worth of projectiles which do double damage. Sydney’s clunky capering makes dodging and attacking these guys a chore even after he gets access to ranged weapons — if there wasn’t a save point before every boss fight, I wouldn’t have finished the game.

Other than that one truly sour note, Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan absolutely nails the experience it wants to the player to have, and there’s an underlying philosophy here that’s not seen in modern game design any more. Specifically, in the old days it frequently felt like designers were trying to ‘beat’ the player by creating experiences which could technically be bested, yet frequently crushed anyone arrogant enough to load the game up.

These days, games are largely designed with the expectation that anyone who puts in the time will be able to see end credits. While I genuinely think it’s a better way of crafting an experience, I’ll admit to a long-held fondness for titles that seem to genuinely hate the player, hand-crafted by people who are frankly a little insulted that I’d be arrogant enough to even try to beat them at their own game.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Collectorvision Games. It is currently available on PC, PS5, XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the XBX. Approximately 12 hours of play was devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed.

Parents: This game was rated E10 by the ESRB, and contains Mild Blood and Fantasy Violence. This is as safe as games get. Yes, there are bloody skeletons and scary traps, but if a child is old enough for an Indiana Jones movie, this game should be fine.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue is presented as text, and there are no vital audio cues. The game is fully accessible.