The Mummy Demastered takes the word ‘Metroidvania’ one step further

The word “Metroidvania” came into being to describe, very specifically, a subset of games in Konami’s Castlevania series that adopted a nonlinear, exploratory format reminiscent of Nintendo’s Super Metroid. Over time, its meaning expanded through use and misuse into a catch-all term that covers any platform action game with an emphasis on discovery and character growth, and a complex enough world to require auto-mapping. Linguistic prescriptivists may hate it, but “Metroidvania” does precisely what all good words should: It conveys a concept quickly, efficiently and clearly.

Yet it’s only now, more than a decade after “Metroidvania” entered the mainstream gaming lexicon, that someone has finally created the first game to truly embrace the full scope of the word: WayForward’s The Mummy Demastered.

Launching this fall on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Steam and Nintendo Switch, The Mummy Demastered in many ways feels like a game unstuck in time. As an adaptation of a major Hollywood film for PC and consoles (rather than a quick free-to-play cash-in on mobile devices), The Mummy Demastered belongs to a vanishing breed. On top of that, it has an unapologetically old-school feel to it, with pixel-based sprite graphics and two-dimensional gameplay. It has the look of an indie game rather than a tie-in to a major studio film with budget of more than $100 million — but all of that works in its favor.

“WayForward has always been a champion of pixel art,” says The Mummy Demastered’s director, Austin Ivansmith. “Our games were made popular on handhelds, where those pixel-style games would flourish, and where the constraints of the tech and the small resolution worked hand-in-hand. But seeing pixel art on a big screen is just as fun, even if the constraints are artificial these days.

“For The Mummy, we looked at a couple of previous WayForward games for inspiration. With Mighty Switch Force HD, we took the pixel art and said, ‘Let’s paint a big, beautiful version of it.’ That had its share of complications. A simple, 16x16-pixel sprite — how hard could it be to blow that up and interpret what it is? As it turns out, the subtlety of those pixels can lead to a lot of different interpretations. It was a similar challenge with DuckTales: Remastered. You have to fill in what the pixels leave to the imagination.

“With the Switch Force 2 console versions, we tried the opposite approach. We said, ‘The art is already great, so let’s not do the paintover style this time.’ And it looked great left alone in its original pixel format. There’s something really beautiful about seeing pixel art on a big screen like that. Games like Shovel Knight, Axiom Verge and our Shantae games are some of my favorites. Sure there is some obvious nostalgia there, but I really like the timeless quality of pixel art, especially games of the Super Nintendo era. I love the NES, and the SNES holds a special place in my heart. So when given the opportunity to choose between HD or pixels for The Mummy Demastered, I really wanted it to feel like it could exist on the SNES or Game Boy Advance.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the movie studio didn’t have any objections to seeing its effects-heavy film reduced to a retro pixel style. “They were champions of the look,” says Ivansmith. “The gaming group at Universal are WayForward fans from way back. We have worked with them in the past on Scorpion King and Despicable Me games, and have a long history. When this opportunity came up, they really favored the pixel-art approach and wanted WayForward to be the studio to make it. So when they approached us it was, ‘Here’s the movie. Here are the parameters of the world. What do you want to make?’ Right away it seemed like the perfect fit for a Metroidvania. So we pitched the idea of taking the agents that exist in this universe, [and we] made them our heroes and built the game around them.

“In a way,” Ivansmith says, “it’s almost a sequel to [WayForward’s 2011 DS Metroidvania] Aliens: Infestation.” The similarities definitely bear examination. Besides the moody pixel art and exploratory layouts, The Mummy Demastered also sidesteps the tricky challenge of directly adapting a film and instead exists in its periphery. Rather than assume the role of Tom Cruise’s Sgt. Nick Morton, players step into the anonymous boots of an agent for the Prodigium, the paramilitary organization that Universal Studios hopes to use as a sort of binding narrative thread for the Dark Universe franchise that The Mummy kicked off.

“Prodigium is going to be a unifying element through all the films. They’re like the Knights Templar; they’ve existed for centuries and are following monsters, trying to keep track of them and keep evil at bay. In the film, the Prodigium agents are dressed in nondescript street clothes to keep a low profile. But in our game they have to go head to head with the monsters under Ahmanet’s control, so it made sense for these agents to gear up to send in the best of the best in S.W.A.T. or riot gear, because you can potentially die ...”

Death becomes a critical play mechanic in The Mummy Demastered. As in Infestation, the anonymous Prodigium agents replace the standard video game concept of lives or continues; when you fall in battle, Prodigium sends another generic agent to replace the lost fighter.

The Mummy Demastered puts a different spin on the idea than Infestation. Where the Aliens game gave players a limited number of colonial Marines, each with his or her own name and portrait, The Mummy Demastered doesn’t limit the number of continues available to you. Instead, punishment for failure takes a different form: Your fallen comrade becomes corrupted by Ahmanet and joins the armies of the undead, meaning you’ll be forced to destroy him. It’s not that simple, though, because the newly zombified hero literally is you, and possesses all the skills and upgrades your avatar did upon dying.

“You can carry two additional weapons at a time, and if you die while carrying those ... well, if you want those weapons again, you need to hunt down your undead self and retrieve them,” Ivansmith says.

The game does at least offer some mitigating factors to help offset the danger presented by a violent zombie armed with a hero’s skills and weapons. The Mummy Demastered uses a Halo-inspired arms system that allows you to carry a limited selection of the weapons and subweapons you’ve collected at any given time. In order to swap weapons, you need to find one of the arms depots scattered around the map and change your loadout. While this increases the game’s difficulty in one respect — it forces you to make hard choices and limits your range of combat skills — it also prevents a death from completely overwhelming you. Since a fallen Prodigium agent retains his gear upon dying, you have to take out your comrade’s wight in order to reclaim his equipment. Your agent’s weapon limitations guarantee you’ll have some sort of backup — and that you won’t have to face a zombie toting an entire arsenal.

Not that this necessarily guarantees you’ll have an easy time reclaiming your weapons. Precisely the degree of threat a fallen agent presents appears to be the biggest challenge Ivansmith’s team has to grapple with as the project nears its end.

“Facing an undead agent is much easier now than when it was first implemented, but they are still our most challenging enemy in the game,” he says. “Initially, wherever you died, that’s where they’d be raised from the dead and waiting for you, no matter how inconvenient. They had the full power of your upgrades and ammo, and their HP was based on how many health packs you were carrying. All of these combined factors made them nearly impossible to defeat. We made it more manageable by paring down the health of the undead agents, but keeping them equipped with your former weapons so that you feel like you’re taking on your former self.

“It’s really fun to have the tables turn on you. Feeling like you’re suddenly on the opposite end of your own weapon — being outgunned by your former self — is the essence of what makes it a fun challenge. It’s jarring how vulnerable you feel to suddenly lose all of the gear you’ve been collecting throughout the game, basically going back to square one out of nowhere, but it’s so rewarding when you kill your undead previous self and get your gear back.

“It’s like those old-school games that were just unrelenting, but people still love playing them because they’re challenging and rewarding. I think the challenge of facing off against one of these agents and getting your gear back is very satisfying. I was doing a playthrough recently where I got near the final boss, and I died carrying one of the most powerful weapons in the game. I could’ve beaten the game without [it], but I really wanted my gear back. The fight was intense, and I was yelling and laughing like I would play a game at home — and when I finally killed my zombie-self and took my gear back, I had to hold myself back from yelling full volume in the office. It’s taken a lot of tuning over the course of the entire project but I’m really proud of this death mechanic.”

Along these lines, The Mummy Demastered’s loose connection to the film — the only actor to appear in-game is the pixel sprite of Sofia Boutella’s Princess Ahmanet — gave the team a great deal of latitude to diverge from the source material. Ivansmith admits it’s been a tricky balancing act at times, though.

“I remember playing old games and thinking, ‘Why did they do this? Why is there a giant spider in this game? They should have stuck closer to the movie!’ And now I’m doing the opposite of what I would have done back then — ‘it has to be different so it can be its own thing!’ It’s an interesting contradiction, and Universal has really gone to bat for us and embraced this idea of filling the game with enemies and monsters like old games.”

By far, though, the most interesting creative decision WayForward has taken with The Mummy Demastered has been the way it’s interpreted the Metroidvania concept. With the game’s near-future sci-fi vibe and armored, gun-toting agents, it plays very much like a real-world take on Metroid. The Prodigium agents aren’t quite Samus Aran, but they use many of the same rules that she does. Everything from 100-point health upgrades to secondary weapons that can blast through armored doors ... and while the first hour of the game doesn’t grant any high-leaping boots or double-jump skills, it definitely contains recognizable hooks for players to return to once they’ve upgraded their capabilities.

At the same time, though, the game world gives off massive Castlevania vibes. The adventure begins in the moonlight-soaked Gothic architecture of London, and pathways to several subterranean areas open once you beat the first boss — that giant spider. Prodigium agents may handle like Samus, but their foes are creatures of the night: ravens, bats, skeletons and the like. The ravens behave a lot like Castlevania’s: They rise from their perch as you draw near, then swoop down to attack. Skeletons toss bones in a looping arc. The bats flutter back and forth while spitting fireballs, exactly like the giant bats on the bridge to the clock tower at the end of the original Castlevania.

Ivansmith admits those familiar vibes didn’t happen by mistake. “Our thought was, ‘Let’s take these pieces of Castlevania, and these pieces of Metroid and these pieces of Contra, and try to make them all work together as [their] own thing.’ I think we've done that pretty well.”

“Early in development, I played a lot of Metroid and Super Metroid again,” he says. “I also played a lot of AM2R, because that had just been released the previous year. And through Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow again, front to back, collecting all of the souls. It was really fun to experience again. I noted that I tend to get lost in Castlevania titles, but never in Super Metroid — it does a great job of pathing you through the game. So seeing how one game world works [versus] another — and really scrutinizing what differentiates Castlevania from Metroid — helped inform what our game would become.

“I don’t want to make it sound as rudimentary as copying, but that’s what every artist does as a starting point. I had an instructor in college who would say during figure drawing classes: ‘Do you like what the person next to you is drawing? Copy it. When you do it, it won’t look like theirs.’ Once you go through the process of creating your own version, it becomes its own thing.

“And, speaking of copying, it’s funny to go back and play through the original Castlevania or watch a speedrun of it, because those developers were basically just watching Universal monster movies and copying them, even riffing on the actors’ names for their fake credits. It’s been a joke completely lost on me until starting this game, because before even making the game or playing games for inspiration, I watched every single classic Universal monster movie. Having gone back and seen all the films, and all the actors’ names, it was interesting seeing how many references in Castlevania were actually ties back to those films!

“So if a couple of our enemies seem similar to some Castlevania enemies, it might be time to watch some classic Universal Monster movies and see the source material for yourself.”