Montezuma’s Revenge Returns For Its 40th Anniversary

Do you remember the 80s game Montezuma’s Revenge by Parker Bros?
Well, I do — and that’s exactly why I decided to contact Eastasiasoft as soon as I heard about this remake and ask for a review key, something I rarely do.

After a bit of back and forth, I got a key, fired it up on my PS5, and prepared myself for greatness, especially since the screenshots in the email looked decent enough.

It didn’t take more than a few seconds before I wanted to throw my copy out the window — but since this was a digital key, that wasn’t really an option…

Why did I want to do that, you may ask? Well, the game’s protagonist, Pedro, is suddenly talking — endlessly — with a godawful accent, rambling about things you couldn’t care less about.

Things improved slightly once I went into the settings and slid the speech volume bar all the way down to zero. Bye bye, Pedro’s totally unnecessary voice.

As a side note, you can also play as Pedro’s sister Rosita now, but to honest, I decided to not check if her voice was better to listen at.

I played the game for a while, and although I did enjoy parts of it, something still felt off.

So I decided to fire up the old Parker Bros C64 version to see if I had completely misremembered the game.

Nope. It was exactly as I remembered it: fluid, not annoying, and brutally hard.

Maybe this is just my rose-tinted retro glasses talking, but how did that C64 game turn into what you see in the GIF below?

I can’t quite explain it, but the magic just isn’t there. The protagonist moves strangely, dying is annoyingly slow, and the controls feel floaty. And that last part is the biggest problem of all — precise controls were the main reason the original became popular.

I kept playing and told myself several times that it really wasn’t that bad… until I realized that bad level design from the 80s doesn’t necessarily work very well in games more than 40 years later.

When the game clicks, it’s great. When it doesn’t — and I’m being very gentle here — it’s downright horrible. Unfair, ugly design choices everywhere, like making the player believe a passage is blocked by a huge rock, simply because of awful tiled graphics used as background elements.

Flip-screen gameplay is honestly the last thing I expected to see in 2025. This technique was common on old Atari consoles and computers because they simply didn’t have the graphical power for proper scrolling.

The sound is pretty cool… until you realize it’s basically a 40-second loop.

The graphics look fine most of the time — until you notice how heavily reused the tiles are. While that’s passable in theory, it really doesn’t work when they’re randomly placed throughout rooms, almost as if everything was done by a script rather than careful design and planning.

The whole 2.5D look is interesting, but something inside me says the game would have worked better as pure 2D.

To be fair, some locations actually look quite good.

After dying about 315 times and reaching level 3 (out of 9), I decided there really wasn’t much more to say. Some games should simply never get a remake or a sequel.

There are a few positives, though.

The game is tiny in terms of modern file sizes.

There’s a Platinum trophy and a ton of gold trophies that aren’t too hard to get if you’re into that sort of thing.

Unplugging the drain plug and seeing the gish and water go down was a great touch.

Oh, and let’s not forget that the swimming part in this game is of pure brilliance, yes it actually works as you expect, big praise to the developer for keeping it simple and fair.  

This remake is made by the original creator, and this is how he meant the game to originally be, more levels, more of everything, which is pretty cool.

So it ain’t a total wreck for certain.

I really wanted to like this game. I loved the Spelunker remake, for example, which proved that it is possible to make awful 80s design work today without changing its core.

The total verdict: do not go blind into this one like I did; do some research ( probably why you’re here to begin with). 

It can be fun nd there’s some really good things in it, but you will need to have a lot of extra time and patience on your hands if you want to play through this one instead of other new 80s remakes..

Review key supplied by the Publisher.

The price of the game is $14.99, and available on most storefronts.

You can read the full news item here.

Game trailer added below…