Every couple of years, a major childhood memory resurfaces and sends me on a hunt for that weird PlayStation game that my brother and I were obsessed with but never quite played. An internet search is as follows: on the red-and-black PS1 demo disc, a game featuring a pink-haired wild child fighting pigs and trees that look like hips. The results tell me that the game I’m looking for is a 1997 platformer Tomba!and I feel nostalgic. Then I forget everything and the cycle repeats at the end.
You can imagine my surprise, then, a Earlier this summer, Limited announced the re-release of Run Games Tomba! in all its nonsensical glory for modern consoles. Tomba! Special Edition Available now digitally for PS5, Nintendo Switch and PC. Physical editions, a range of plushies and a themed NEO S controller (pre-orders are unfortunately sold out) are on the way. And I finally discovered it while playing all the tracks almost 20 years after its original release Tomba! It’s even crazier than I remember.
The player character, Tomba, is a wild boy who lives outside society, hunting wild boar and sleeping under the stars. His peace is shattered one day when a group of delinquent pigs break in and wreak havoc, eventually stealing a gold bracelet belonging to his grandfather. To get him back, Tomba travels to nearby towns to find and destroy the leaders of the Evil Pig. Along the way, he meets a series of strange characters who will help guide him on his mission, but only after completing a bunch of tasks for them.
It’s a 2.5D platformer, meaning most of the game works as a two-dimensional side scroller, but you can occasionally switch to the background or foreground to explore the map more deeply. Tomba! Special Edition Not much changes about the original game. The graphics are still distinctly PS1 polygonal and the controls can be clunky. There are some quality-of-life additions though – namely the rewind feature, which is extremely useful, as this game is notoriously difficult in some places. I needed to try certain maneuvers over and over to get them right.
Almost every part of the story and its setting carries a touch of the absurd. Tomba can scale walls, swing on branches, jump with inhuman ability, and apparently store things (including living things) in its stomach, which it can then retrieve when needed. As mentioned earlier, there are fig trees that are meant to be depicted but when Tomba pounces on them and squeezes, a cloud of magical gas pours out. You will encounter a village of dwarves, but you can only communicate with them after jumping on a few dwarves’ heads to learn their language. In another village, everyone has been turned into mice, and for some reason they are all obsessed with the disappearance of a real, never-been-human baby mouse.
One of the most memorable areas is definitely the Mushroom Forest, an evil trip of a place filled with creepy, clown-like anthropomorphic flowers and mushrooms that cause certain diseases when Tomba jumps on them. One will make him laugh uncontrollably, and the other will make him cry – and this crying is deeply disturbing. It scared the crap out of me the first time it happened, if I’m being real. With both fungal diseases, Tomba can’t control his weapons, but instead flaps his arms and screams if you want to attack.
It’s an absolutely stunningly complex game, and it’s visually striking thanks to its loud color palette. But when you’re trying to navigate the often-confusing map layout and multi-task, the search can become overwhelming. Boss fights are also frustrating in their own way. Instead of just beating or killing the Evil Pigs, you have to wrangle each one and drop them into a bag… but the bag floats and most of the time spins.
While often infuriating, Tomba! it was a joy to watch again. It’s relentlessly goofy, and from the moment he starts pounding the steel drums, the soundtrack gave me a nice blast of nostalgia. (Tomba! Special Edition includes both the original soundtrack and the remastered version, and they’re both excellent.) If anything Special Edition announced the reason for the release Tomba! stuck in my memory for so long — I can’t say I’ve ever played another game quite like it.
