Ah, throwback platformers, where would this feature be without you? We're jetting to Central America for this week's game, Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan, an 8-bit styled stage-based platformer with some mild explormer elements by way of upgrades and the occasional backtracking for collectibles. It seems CollectorVision started the Sydney Hunter franchise - each focusing on an Indiana Jones-style archaeologist adventurer with a distinctly Gallic visual design - as a means of producing retro games for defunct consoles, starting with the Intellivision (from which they presumably got their company name) and including most of the major 8-bit and 16-bit home consoles. Curse of the Mayan is the first to be specifically built for modern systems, though still looks a game made in the late '80s (by design, of course).

The plot of The Curse of the Mayan concerns, well, a curse of the Maya people, who have been stuck inside a time-frozen temple for untold years courtesy of the irascible Sun God Kinich Ahau and his minion, Kukulkan the Snake God. Sydney finds himself trapped within as well, and endeavors to defeat Kinich Ahau and Kukulkan by working his way through their other minion Gods (there's a bee one and a water one and an undead one, and they sure do look and act like a bunch of Mega Man bosses) and figuring out how to undo the curse. As I mentioned above, the game uses a stage-based format with a hub area - the hub connects all the entrances to these stages, many of which have pre-requisites and a few are even optional - and a system of colored keys that persist outside of stages, so you can take excess keys into other stages or even buy more (at great expense) in the hub if you don't want to go looking for them.

Like another Indiana Jones ersatz, La-Mulana, The Curse of the Mayan leans on two lesser-utilized aspects of platformers in particular: level design built around many secret walls and pits, and a high though not insurmountable level of difficulty throughout. Neither is quite as severe as it is in Takumi Naramura's MSX love letters however, with most secret walls having telltale cracks to set them apart from the rest of the environment so you don't have to whip every single tile to test and, while checkpoints aren't exactly plentiful in The Curse of the Mayan (and you don't keep any progress you made since the last one, including collectibles), most stages do have at least several dotted around, including a compulsory one outside the stage's boss door. Sydney starts with his trusty whip - which has a short range but a relatively quick fire rate - and he'll also pick up spears (which are his only weapon when underwater) and a boomerang, each of which trades speed for greater range in different ratios. Each stage also has at least one Relic, which might provide necessary upgrades to make progress - there's one that lets you breathe underwater indefinitely, for example, and another that makes invisible blocks appear - or a few conveniences like a cash doubler or one that halves all incoming damage. Currency gems found throughout stages can be traded for HP upgrades and other bonuses in high quantities, and the game has two collectible types: Crystal Skulls, needed for unlocking subsequent levels a la Stars from Super Mario 64, and Yellow Diamonds, which appear to have no purpose whatsoever. Some stages have a few collectibles you can't reach on your visit without a Relic from a later stage but the game only pulls this trick once: once you have the Relic in question it offers no further roadblocks of that sort.

Sydney Hunter, which I'm now realizing is probably a play on Tia Carrere's Relic Hunter TV show and its protagonist Sydney, is a solid enough example of a throwback platformer but for a few snags here and there that aren't egregious enough to sour the experience but do belie a certain roughness around the edges. That's literally true of a visual bug I kept encountering where you could see gaps between the game's tiles (each stage looking like it was constructed on a grid, with various graphics being one square apiece), but also includes gameplay issues like exaggerated hitboxes, enemies spawning on top of you, and forcing the player to play a game-within-a-game (one of the Intellivision Sydney Hunters, presented in-game as an arcade machine with a hidden key inside of it) which, diplomatically speaking, plays like ass. I appreciated the general balance of difficulty and emphasis on collectibles and exploration in its maze-like stages, but there were definitely times where I felt close to throwing in the towel. Dropping down into an instant deathtrap because you slightly clipped off a nearby block some ten screens since the last checkpoint is enough to drive anyone a little loopy. I persevered though, some might say heroically, and managed to roll credits on a game that probably has more going for it than against it overall. Worth noting: some of the stage BGM were jams, especially the final boss fight, so that definitely helped mitigate some frustration (the OST's bandcamp page is here; no-one's uploaded it to YouTube yet). I'll give this one a weak thumbs up, and I certainly wouldn't be hesitant to try any more of Mr. Hunter's adventures in the future.

Rating: 3 out of 5.