The Mummy Demastered - 3/52

     So before I begin, I feel like this is an important thing to note.  We're talking about a licensed video game today.  Now, if you're familiar with the stigma of licensed games, this is already a negative for you, and that's completely fair.  Games based on other forms of media generally range from mediocre to really bad.  But I urge you to stick with this one because, in my opinion, the Mummy Demastered is not only good, it's great.

     Before we begin talking about the game, might as well briefly touch on the movie.  The Mummy is a 2017 horror-action movie starring Tom Cruise, who at this point I'm convinced is trapped in a Truman Show scenario and doesn't actually know that he's in movies.  He plays a soldier that I assume has a name, but let's be real here, you're just going to call him Tom Cruise.  He and his buddy, a soldier who probably also has a name but he's pretty much just Jake Johnson so we're rolling with that, accidentally stumble upon an Ancient Egyptian tomb(or prison, the trailers say prison but, like, someone died so it's still a tomb).  After investigating it with the stereotypical hot archaeologist that's in every Mummy movie, they unleash the evil Princess Ahmanet who wishes to turn Tom Cruise into the Egyptian god of evil, Set.  Or maybe the Egyptian god of death, Anubis.  They kind of go back and forth whether it's Set or the god of death.  I mean, it can't just be that they didn't properly do their research in a Tom Cruise action movie.  Anyways, hijinks ensue, they fight the Knights Templar, join the Avengers and Tom Cruise becomes an aardvark.  It's admittedly not a very good movie.

     With everything I just said you may be doubly pessimistic on the Mummy Demastered.  But the game is very clever about how it uses it's source material and it weirdly arises from a stipulation in Tom Cruise's contract.  Tom Cruise, you see, has never appeared in any of the video game versions of his films, as his contracts only allow the actor's likeness to be used in promotional shots and posters for the film in question.  So, knowing that you can't actually use Tom Cruise in this Tom Cruise movie game the game's developers, WayForward, a company that I'm personally very fond of, decided that you'd be playing as a nameless soldier either way, so why not go all in on that by making your soldier nameless, faceless and, most of all, expendable.  But, I'm getting a tad ahead of myself.

     The Mummy Demastered is yet another example of a Metroidvania, a genre I talked about in my post on Strider.  And, as good as I believe Strider was, the Mummy Demastered blows it out of the water.  The game is far more challenging and far more rewarding, made doubly so by the lack of health restoring rooms.  Normally, I'd call this a negative towards the game, leaving players without the ability to reliably restore their health, but this is actually a purposeful part of the game's design and, honestly, it works.  The game functions really well as a horror movie adaptation despite being a run and gun shooter with an upbeat soundtrack and loads of powerups and upgrades.  You never feel like you're fully at an advantage while playing the Mummy Demastered, especially given the game's absolutely brilliant gimmick.

     You'll very likely be dying a lot playing through the Mummy Demastered.  Here's the thing though, whenever you die, it's not just starting back at the last save spot or checkpoint.  I mentioned before that your character is expendable.  And indeed, whenever you die, that soldier you were playing as is gone.  You pick up as a new soldier without any of your additional weapons, health powerups or ammo capacity increases.  You then have to go back to where your previous self died and retrieve everything that you may have dropped.  Only problem?  Your previous self is now one of Ahmanet's zombie minions, able to use everything that he or she had at the time of death, albeit without the extra health bars to keep things balanced.  This single-handedly makes the Mummy Demastered stand out in the genre and I would love to see this idea continued in future monster-movie inspired games.

      But there is another side to this.  The Mummy Demastered is a fairly difficult game without the zombified previous versions of yourself.  Enemies are absolutely everywhere and, while mostly follow simple patterns, usually spawn infinitely.  The difficulty spike in this game is steep, especially in the upper London area of the game, where you have multiple giant rooms of various different kinds of infinitely spawning enemies.  I died mostly in this area and ended up piling up previous versions of myself that I would then have to fight and hope I didn't die before killing them and getting my stuff back.  The game is at least fair in that no more than two zombified soldiers can appear on the same map, but used in conjunction with infinitely spawning enemies and the fact that you start off each new soldier with only 99 health, which doesn't even fully restore when you pick up the previous soldier's other health packs, and you can get walled here very easily.

     Bosses in this game are absolutely magnificent.  Not only are they absolutely gorgeous examples of pixel art, inspired both by Egyptian mythology and various SNES/Genesis games, but the size and scope of many of them make each encounter challenging and memorable.  Well, except for one who is memorable in a very different way, but we'll get to him.  The Sobek boss fight in particular is a beautiful mash of Super Metroid's Kraid and Crocomire fights and it's just wonderful.  I wish this game had some sort of boss rush mode just so I can revisit specifically the bosses I love them so much.

     So, aside from difficulty, is there anything I don't like about this game?  Yeah.  The final boss doesn't work properly.  At all.  It's kind of magical, really.  I'm not sure if this is actually true for all copies but looking online, other people have mentioned that this has happened to them so I'm assuming this is a pretty common glitch.  Picture this.  You're sitting at the save room before the final boss, ready to fight whatever last challenge that this game that has, up to this point, been beating you like a dog.  You hold your breath as you most likely jump through the doorway because, you know, that's how you do it.  First form.  Ahmanet herself standing before you.  She starts attacking you and you try your best to dodge while getting some shots off.  She goes for another attack, this one maybe a bit easier to get through scot-free, but you won't be able to get anything off on her before she goes into her next attack, a copy of the first.  You know how to dodge it better this time, of course, so you roll under the fire, take some shots, she teleports, summons a couple zombie goons for you to fight and... she stops.  Completely.

     In my playthrough of the game, after 14 hours and 200+ deaths, my encounter with the first phase of the final boss renders her completely unable to move.  And it's not like she just completely froze either, I was still able to damage her.  She just apparently forgot that we were fighting, as she entered her stance for the cutscene between phases, letting me wail on her until phase two began.  I was a bit underwhelmed but, you know what, it also made me smile.  I'm kind of used to games glitching out on me and at least this one was beneficial for once.  So I finish her off and it's onto the next phase.  This is it.  Set, the Egyptian god of Evil himself.  Fate of the world time, baby.  Surely this will be the fight I've been hoping for to end such a great adventure.

    ...yeah, he froze too.  I don't even know why this one happened, there were no future cutscenes that involved Set that the script could've cut to.  He just stopped.  And for a while I thought I was going to have to reset because it didn't appear like he was taking any damage.  But, sure enough, he was taking damage from each hit.  He strangely seemed to have less HP than the boss of upper London, Khepri, god of scarabs.  Though I feel like that one is just because I had the strongest guns in the game at the point I fought Set while I was still using some pretty basic equipment when I fought Khepri.  And with that, I beat Set, the ultimate incarnation of evil(who is an aardvark), escaped from the collapsing area and finished the game.  And, honestly, I would've felt disappointed except for two things.  One, glitches that benefit you are funny.  I may not have had the big final boss fight I was hoping for to end such a great experience but, you know what, it was still a fun fight because of how ridiculous it was.  And two, this is actually accurate to the movie.

      The Mummy, as I've mentioned before, not a great movie.  It's pretty slow and unfocused, working on setting up a future cinematic universe rather than making a good mummy movie.  A cinematic universe that likely will never manifest because the Mummy was so reviled.  But... I gotta say, I actually enjoyed the Mummy a bit, and it comes down to a few simple elements.  One of which is Sofia Boutella, who I'm convinced can do no wrong even if she does mostly star in pretty mediocre to bad films.  But the other main component in all this is actually how they handle the Tom Cruise character and, in turn, how it relates to the game.

     Tom Cruise's nameless soldier guy spends most of the movie getting beaten and laughed at.  He constantly ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up either in a big fight scene that he's severely outclassed in or someone is messing with him, sometimes beyond the grave.  Take out the gun fights and all the setup for future monster movies and you got yourself a pretty fun slapstick comedy.  And this lines up perfectly to the game.  Tom Cruise spends most of the movie at a disadvantage.  He gets kicked around constantly and is almost always in danger of being killed, yet always avoids death by the will of Ahmanet.  It's almost as if the movie was made off the game rather than the opposite.

     So what we've got so far is a great, if not really flawed, licensed game that accurately portrays the source material it's based off and surpasses it on all fronts, however low of a bar it may be.  But that's not all.  Go back to my disappointing final boss fight with Ahmanet.  It was, as I've mentioned, a few middling attacks, a couple minions summoned and then she just went down.  Well, in the movie the climax is pretty much a joke.  Tom Cruise gets slapped around some more because the movie knows exactly what we want, Ahmanet imbues him with the powers of Set, they briefly ally themselves before Tom Cruise's ego is able to successfully fight off an ancient god and then Tom Cruise easily smacks around Ahmanet, killing the mummy, turning into an aardvark and... becoming the Mummy now I guess?  Either way, whether intentionally or not, the glitched out final boss fight is a somewhat accurate depiction of the climax of the movie.  Bravo.  Brava.

     If you couldn't tell from how much I had to say on the subject, I fell in love with the Mummy Demastered over my playthrough.  It expertly combined my love of Metroidvanias, my love of horror movies and my love of not having to actually pretend I care about Tom Cruise into one of the best games I'm sure I'll play for the 52.  If I had immediately played this when I bought it last year it would've made my best list easily.  It's just a great game and I urge you all to give it a chance.  And with that, we're all caught up with what I've currently finished of the 52.  I hope you've enjoyed my thoughts so far, especially this one, I'm super proud of it.  And we'll kick back here next time with either Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth: Hacker's Memory, Pokemon Sun or Soul Axiom.  See you all then.