There was once a time when Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy may have been considered a really good game. As it stands in 2021, a good 18 years after it was made, it’s actually not that bad of a game. It was good enough for me to play it through from beginning to end, which is more than I can say of some of these other games in the backlog.

I’m not going to go into the premise too deep, but it’s a game where you play as two characters, Sphinx… and the Cursed Mummy (Tut). Each character has their own set of adventures. Sphinx is the hacky-slashy character that roams around doing quests and mini-games. The Cursed Mummy is basically a muppet that you use to solve various puzzles by setting him on fire, electrocuting him, slicing him up, etc. Where Sphinx’s gameplay revolves around combat, the Mummy’s is all about the puzzles.

The thing that bugged me though, is that the Mummy seems to get way more screen time, since some of the puzzles can get pretty involved and devious and take way more time to complete than Sphinx’s sections. They’re never really that difficult; you can usually figure out what you need to do within a few minutes, but each subsequent area gets bigger and more complex. By the time you begin reaching the later parts of the game, you’re gonna groan every time you have to switch over to the mummy, because you know you’re in for a good chunk of gameplay with no save point in sight.

Which brings me to one of my main complaints. Above, I mentioned how it’s an old game, with old game design. One of the worst parts of old game design were archaic save systems. In this case, you can only save at certain statues, and those statues are sometimes really, really far apart. In a game with wonky 3D platforming and some clumsy collision detection, most of the time a death will come through no fault of your own, and as a result you may have to play a pretty big chunk of a dungeon all over again. Thankfully, the Mummy can’t die, and that’s a good thing because you’ll be falling from ledges a lot. The only frustrating thing about his sections is that the more you fuck up, the longer it’s going to take you to get past it.

It’s weird that Sphinx gets top-billing here. He’s devoid of all personality, a by-product of the “silent hero” era. Even though the Mummy has no dialogue either, his clumsy mannerisms and yips and yelps give him far more personality than Sphinx. Combat isn’t that great either, which I can kinda forgive, since most 3D platformers at the time had pretty sucky combat, but it’s about as bare-bones as it gets here. Enemies don’t have any real strategy. Mainly you just hit them before they can hit you. With games like Zelda Ocarina of Time having existed for a few years by the time this came out, there’s not really any excuse for the overly simplistic combat. This carries over to the boss battles, which really suck. I mean, really suck. To use the OoT comparison again, these boss battles each have a strategy, but it’s the simplest shit you could possibly imagine. None of them are a challenge, except for possibly the big scorpion lizard thing, but that’s because you’re fighting shitty controls and laggy animations while having a very small window to do what you need to do. Still, I died maybe twice before I devised a winning strategy (running around in circles).

The final boss, Set, is an epic joke of a battle. Not only is he pathetically easy, but his “supreme power” that everyone is so fucking afraid of consists of waving his arms around and creating little light barriers that are easily avoidable. They were the lame shitty mechanics you’d expect from a stage two boss fight, not the Big Bad that was supposedly soooooooo powerful. It literally took me about six hits to kill him, at which point I waited for the next part of the battle. But no, that was it. Game over.

I guess it makes sense though, why Set was focused on putting so many impenetrable protective barriers around his temple. He’s a little bitch. It really does make me wonder how much of a bitch Osiris is though, since Set was almost complete with his goal of killing off the other gods. If I were Sphinx I’d be seriously reconsidering my beliefs.

Anyways, it’s done. It’s gone from the Backlog Bingo board, and I’m kind of glad it didn’t fall victim to the Shotgun Round. I put way too much time into that game to not finish it.