Tomba! Special Edition (Switch) Review 

Gamers of a certain age will remember the golden era of demo discs. Every few months, one could go to any newsagent or supermarket and pick up a copy of PlayStation Magazine, with which you’d get a disc you could slap into your PS1 and play a host of demos. If you were poor like I was, these discs would get played on repeat for months and years on end, despite only having a tiny vertical slice of a few games. Tomba – known as Tombi here in Australia – was on one of those demo discs, and I enjoyed it very much. 

So when LRG announced it was bringing Tomba to modern platforms, including the Switch, I was excited. I remember being vaguely impressed by the game back in the day, and launching the game on Switch I was a little disappointed at first. It looked fine, I guess, but it didn’t seem particularly impressive, visually and conceptually. Then the perspective shifted as I moved into the background, and it all clicked. 

Tomba is ostensibly an action adventure platformer, with all the trappings of the genre in the era. At least, that’s the idea — in practice it’s more of a puzzle game, where the action platforming and exploration is the medium through which you gain puzzle pieces. Yes, there are enemies to defeat and secret collectibles to find, but the real trick here is to figure out the order in which you do things. 

There’s a certain amount of non-linearity to the game, but only so far as you can explore your surroundings deeply before moving on. If you want to progress, you’ll have to do everything in the right order, find the right things, and talk to the right NPCs. Some have called it a metroidvania of sorts, and while I wouldn’t quite go that far, that feeling of being lost and finding your way forward is certainly present. 

That said, it can be quite obtuse and frustrating at times. The path forward in Tomba isn’t always clear, and the dozens of items you collect throughout the game don’t often illuminate that path in an obvious way. It’s not helped by the fact that you’ll often collect an item that won’t be used for hours, so it litters up your inventory, almost training you to ignore it to the point where, when there finally is a use for it, you’ve forgotten its existence at all. 

There’s a heavy reliance on finding things, both objects and people, too, and this often requires a lot of backtracking. There are some limited options for fast travel at least – a pretty surprising inclusion for a game this old – but when you don’t know where these things are, you’ll spend a lot of time just scouring areas you’ve visited before, hoping you stumble upon the thing you’re looking for. It’s a frustrating experience when you’ve been everywhere and looked at everything, only to discover that you need to jank yourself up onto a platform just out of view to progress. 

In terms of the moment-to-moment gameplay, there’s not a lot to complain about. Tomba runs, jumps, and attacks exactly as you’d expect him to, and while it does feel very slightly clunky, it’s better than similar games of the era — though markedly worse than just about anything Nintendo’s ever put out. The jankiness of it all is somewhat charming though, as rather than just being a game from a bygone era, it also feels like one. It’s nostalgic, and sanding down the rough edges, while making the game more playable, would have taken away from the nostalgic charm. 

In terms of presentation, well, it’s Tomba, warts and all. LRG has preserved the PS1 classic down to every pixel, with very little in the way of upgrades or improvements outside of the usual emulator tricks like save states and rewinds. If you were hoping for an experience closer to a remaster, you’re out of luck, but those who want to experience the game exactly as it was are getting exactly that. It looks as it should, runs well, and is a joy to play both docked and handheld. We should expect no different, though, given it’s a PS1 game being emulated. 

Tomba is a product of a bygone era, resuscitated and presented as it was, with no nostalgic filters on top. The good here outweighs the bad, but there’s no denying that it looks, feels, and plays just like Tomba did on the PS1. It’s one of the more impressive sidescrollers of the era, with some bold ideas that were well ahead of its time, but the usual frustrations and limitations are present too, as they rightly should be. 

Rating: 3.5/5