Tomba! Special Edition [Second Opinion]
Tomba! is a puzzle game disguised as a platformer that was developed by Whoopee Camp and published by Sony Computer Entertainment back in 1997 for the original PlayStation. The Special Edition is a rerelease of the original game with a few quality-of-life changes but other than that, it's all the same. You now have the pleasure of saving at any time, a rewind button (that I admittedly used a lot), and added control tutorials. With a game as complicated and confusing as this one, adding a control menu and signs everywhere with the appropriate controls was an absolute necessity.
Other than those few things, the game hasn’t changed. It’s still the same game, just a bit less frustrating since you can save easier and go back in time if you mess up a jump. At first, I wanted to avoid rewinding as I don’t usually like to use savestates on older games, but honestly, Tomba! is too difficult of a game. I would have died much more than I already did if I hadn’t abused the rewind every time I missed a jump. If you would like to attempt the game without using this feature I wish you luck and patience.
The gameplay itself is very unique, even now I don’t see games using a similar formula. The game is a 2D platformer but there are times where you can climb into the background, kind of similar to a few levels in Donkey Kong when you are launched into the background. When you enter villages, similar to an RPG, the game takes on a top-down camera approach and you can’t run or jump in these areas. You can talk to every NPC you see and most will give you a quest. The quests can range from any random thing like giving a monkey bananas to showing a dwarf what it looks like to laugh and cry so he can become a famous actor.
The world of Tomba! is seemingly random and cartoony but the quests do have structure. There’s a forest of mushrooms that will either force Tomba to laugh or cry at random points, even overtaking your attack button to instead laugh/cry. You’d think this is useless and annoying but there are quite a few quests that need you to be laughing/crying. Like crying at a dwarf will make him feel guilty enough to let you down a slide, or laughing at a door marked with the laughter symbol will let you go through it. When you need to properly attack you can eat healing mushrooms. And this is all just one area and a few quests! There’s so much to do and see in this game.
Tomba! clearly doesn’t take itself too seriously. Similar to a cartoon, it follows the illogical logic of the world it is and doesn’t notice how funny everything is. Like, how there’s a 100-Year-Old Man who gives you a 100-Year-Old Key that can only open 100-Year-Old Chests. There are also other Old Men in the game, like the 1000, 10,000, and One Million-Year-Old Man (who give you their respective keys to respective chests). Based on this you can probably tell that the game has a lot of backtracking. Once you get a new key you are going to have to go back and open every chest you had to avoid. I personally never felt annoyed by the backtracking in this game, usually, there was a mission that I still had to complete in the same area anyway. Plus they made backtracking easy, there’s an item that allows you to teleport to an area you’ve been to. They are one-time use but they aren’t too rare. You also will eventually get a bell that corresponds to the Old Men of Time characters that will allow you to teleport to them, these bells can also be used multiple times.
Tomba! is certainly one of the most unique and cartoony (without being an actual cartoon) video game I’ve played. Tomba himself has a pretty fun and intense personality that comes out through his animations and actions. Even though he can’t talk, he dresses, looks, and acts like a caveman. He’s pretty unhinged. Running around on all fours and leaping like an animal, he even saves a bunch of baby birds by holding them in his stomach… Only to regurgitate them later when their owner asks for them back.
The game is one big fetch quest, but not in a bad way I promise. While you’re swinging and running around doing the platforming part of the game, you will be finding seemingly useless items that will later help you complete a quest only to get another useless item until one of these useless items actually isn’t useless and helps you progress. It’s a bit like a point-and-click puzzle game, but instead of using a cursor to explore the map you’re a caveman without any inhibitions. And it’s awesome. You’ll have to find out what item goes where and which NPC needs what item or what they want Tomba to do. The only clue you have to figure it out is the brief bit of dialogue the NPC gives you and the title of the quest. Reading is important in this game but luckily no one says more than three lines.
Tomba! would easily have been one of my favorite games if I had the pleasure of playing the game when it came out. Even without the rewind function, this game is more fun and fascinating than it is frustrating. There’s also such a satisfaction of finally finding an item you need and having it be the trigger to complete multiple quests in a row. I’m glad Tomba! has been rereleased for new people to enjoy and the original fans to come back. Tomba! will be getting a 10/10 from me! The game is currently available on Playstation 4/5 and Switch.