Back again for our regular Sunday roundup of quick-fire reviews and impressions of everything under the spotlight at Retro Arcadia this week, old and new and a bit of both…

Scarabaeus is one of those games that could only ever have existed on the Commodore 64 in 1985! It’s a bonkers mix of 3D maze and “proper” puzzles, spread over three floors of an Egyptian tomb, which you’ve arrived at in your spaceship in search of the titular treasure, as well as an antidote to the spider bite you got on the way in! The first level involves chasing a mummy (apparently!) around an impressively fast-moving and super-smooth maze, with walls that appear and disappear to cleverly mix it up, and every time you catch the mummy, you’ll be rewarded with a hieroglyph, which will gradually populate a 3×3 grid you’ll need on the next floor, accessed via an elevator on a winch you wind up and down, but really wasn’t designed for modern d-pads because miss a single direction press as you rotate and you’ll crash to your death! This becomes more of a problem after the very lengthy game of cat and mouse on the next floor, where you first need to lure deadly spiders out of the alcoves where you then need to use those hieroglyphs in a kind of graphical wordsearch puzzle, once you’ve led them far enough away so you can run back and do it in peace! Successfully solving each of the thirteen puzzles here will further reward you with a zombie trap and / or a potion, which you’ll collect in the corresponding location on the final floor (where you’ll also need those zombie traps). One of the alcoves also contains a key to unlock that floor, which you get by solving a different and nicely complex block-sliding puzzle. On the third floor, you can now collect those potions but beware of some that aren’t so good for you, as well as those zombies running around trying to drain what’s left of your health! The potions will boost it though, and also reveal a bit more of the final puzzle, involving lining-up symbols in the right order, which then opens the pharaoh’s burial chamber and the treasure. It can be a cruel game but it’s also incredibly rewarding, with a nice mix of puzzles (assuming you’ve been paying careful attention and also read the instructions), some very intuitive maze-action and a great level of tension and atmosphere. Nice learning curve too, and you’ll want to keep coming back to chip away a bit further! And yes, it’s very C64 in 1985 to look at and listen to as well as play but I wouldn’t have it any other way, and those gorgeous meanies running around are worth the asking price alone!

Soko Banana appeared as Evercade’s Game of the Month last week, as usual preceding its inclusion on its next Indie Heroes Collection, likely to come in early 2025. It was originally launched for the NES last year (including a physical release) after being funded via Kickstarter, and is a modern take on the 1982 sliding-block puzzler Sokoban, first released on NEC’s PC-8801 in Japan but has appeared pretty much everywhere else ever since. That explains the “Soko” in the title then, while “Banana” refers to what your little monkey is pushing around! You need to liberate a set number of crates full of them from nine different warehouses located on five individually themed islands (each with their own sickly sweet chiptunes!), then if you can collect the three additional bananas in every one, you’ll also unlock a bunch of bonus levels. You can push each crate up, down, left and right, and it will then keep moving until it hits something solid, so you need to use the level layout to line them up with one of the exit points, initially just making sure they don’t end up stuck against a wall or something you can’t get around the back of, but as you progress to other islands, each will introduce new hazards and mechanics, such as pits, breakable blocks and teleporters, as well as very quickly getting way more complex and thought-provoking. In fact, I think it was as quickly as the third level of the very first island when I suddenly realised just how clever it was and how much I was enjoying it, and from that point on I never looked back! It’s cute and colourful with loads of personality and variety, and some proper fiendish puzzles. And it was so much fun I actually stopped playing it because, despite enjoying a few of these games of the month already, it’s sold me on the upcoming cart all by itself, so I want to save some of it for then! Oh yeah, credit to Blaze Entertainment for the pic – much better than a dodgy shot of my TV screen! 

I’ve been waiting for a rainy day to pull the trigger on The Monty Mole Collection since it appeared on Nintendo Switch earlier this year, and while I am still waiting for such a day, I also know £3.99 of total bargain in a sale when I see it! This is a comprehensive coming together of the original 8-bit saga, including the main trilogy of Wanted! Monty Mole, Monty on the Run, and (one of my all-time favourites!) Auf Wiedersehen Monty, plus two bonus games, Moley Christmas, given away with Crash magazine, and Sam Stoat: Safebreaker, a spin-off featuring Monty’s cell-mate from the second game, which I’ve always known about but excitingly have never played before now! As well as both Spectrum and Commodore 64 versions of each game available to play (where applicable), you’ve also got multiple difficulty modes if some of the most brutal, unforgiving platformers ever created get a bit much, plus display filters, save states and up to ten seconds of rewind, which I’m glad I never had at the time but is my new best friend today! Hell of a collection, half price or not, so let’s have a quick look at the games… 

Wanted! Monty Mole is a madcap reflection of the 1984 miners’ strike, with you nicking coal from a Yorkshire pit, assuming you don’t get stuck in a death loop… Also assuming you get off the first screen to get stuck in one! It’s a bit rough but there’s still fun to be had in both versions, which are very different to play in this case. Only differences in presentation from here though, especially the wonderful C64 music, as Monty on the Run sees us sprung from prison and collecting money to head off on the cross-Channel ferry. Brilliant game with fiendish but fair design that more than stands up today. And the same goes for Auf Wiedersehen Monty, a more ambitious jaunt across Europe, as Monty collects cash to settle down on his own private Mediterranean island. The 128K Spectrum nailing the music this time too, with some of the most memorable on the system! Moley Christmas is a short mix of classic platforming and simpler challenges, as you try to get the game you’re currently playing to the magazine in time for publication. Spectrum only too, given where it was made for, and one of its greatest cover-tapes as a result! A true curio and no mistake to finish with, and in complete contrast to Scarabaeus from earlier, Sam Stoat: Safebreaker could only be a Spectrum game, full of colour-clash, madcap characters, weird gameplay and more of that insane difficulty to keep you honest… Rewinds aside!

I have also stumbled upon the “bad ending” for Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (on Nintendo DS) on Switch but I went long with those so I’ll save that for a better ending (hopefully) and leave it there for this week! If you want more and you missed it last Wednesday though, we were picking out any four Taito Arcade games to go on a handheld compilation before seeing what they chose themselves, as we discovered Taito Variety Pack on Nintendo Game Boy, so do check that out. Then next Wednesday, it’s as special as it gets for me… My Life With Grandstand Invader From Space Handheld Electronic Game, and the very beginning of my video game journey! Hopefully see you then!

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