The Mummy Demastered

My first instinct when I loaded up The Mummy Demastered was suspicion. A licensed tie-in to a critically panned blockbuster, made fast, sold cheap? That combination has a long and ugly history. But WayForward has form here, and about ten minutes in that suspicion started evaporating. This is a confident, 16-bit-styled Metroidvania that almost completely ignores the film it's attached to and just gets on with being a good game. You play as a nameless Prodigium agent dropped into a nonlinear map that sprawls across tombs, foggy London streets, sewers, subway tunnels, and more, all rendered in sharp pixel art that genuinely earns its retro aesthetic. The core loop is classic: explore, find a weapon or ability, use it to crack open a previously blocked path, repeat. Movement upgrades like ceiling-grab, sprint, and high-jump gate new areas in proper Metroid fashion. The arsenal builds from a basic infinite-ammo machine gun into a solid selection of situational tools, including a shotgun, flamethrower, assault rifle, cluster rocket launcher, harpoon, and several grenade types, though you can only carry two secondary weapons plus one explosive at a time, so there is loadout thinking involved. Some enemies actively demand it: shielded knights shrug off the flamethrower but fold to a plasma beam, while underwater sections make the harpoon the obvious call. That layer of matchup awareness gives the combat more texture than a straight run-and-gun. The standout design choice, and also the most divisive one, is what happens when you die. Your fallen agent reanimates as a zombie, armed with everything you were carrying. A fresh recruit spawns at the last save point, and your first job is to hunt down and kill your own undead self to reclaim your gear. The concept is genuinely clever, and in the early-to-mid game it lands well, creating tense recovery runs with real stakes. The problem is that killing your zombie only returns your weapons and half your health, with no ammo restoration. That forces health grinding from enemy drops before you can reasonably retry a boss, and the grind is slow enough to drag the pacing to a halt. It is a mechanic that works beautifully in concept and imperfectly in execution, and it is the main reason the Steam score sits at a mixed 75% rather than something higher. Players who absorb the rhythm of it and play conservatively will be mostly fine. Players who die repeatedly near a boss room will feel the frustration sharply. Outside of that one rough edge, the game moves at a satisfying clip. The maps are compact and well-constructed, so backtracking rarely becomes tedious. There are 50 hidden relics for completionists, multiple endings, and speedrun-friendly structure for those inclined. The synth-heavy soundtrack by Gavin Allen (recording as monomer) sits somewhere between vaporwave and horror atmospherics, which sounds odd but mostly works. Total playtime lands around six to ten hours depending on how much you explore, which feels right for the scope. The map does not mark door types, which creates genuine friction when searching for blocked passages, and the early game is slightly over-tutorialized before opening up properly around the midpoint. Strip away the Mummy branding and what remains is a tightly made 2D action game that holds its own against most original-IP Metroidvanias from the same era. It won't unseat Super Metroid or Hollow Knight in anyone's personal rankings, but it does one thing exceptionally well: it respects the genre's structure while adding a death mechanic original enough to be remembered, even when that mechanic misfires. If the zombie-recovery concept sounds like your kind of punishment, this is a very easy recommendation.

Alex · Scout Team

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