Review Nobody_Important 2/5 · Jan 11, 2025
Indiana Jones: Buried Under a Mountain of Frustration
Raiders of the Lost Ark can be described in one word: Confusion.
Summary
This adaptation of iconic film is a frustrating, confusion and way too ambitious experience. I can't believe this got a pass at the time considering how limited was the Atari 2600 at the time, and how crazy this game is. You had to use two controllers are …
Raiders of the Lost Ark can be described in one word: Confusion.
Summary
This adaptation of iconic film is a frustrating, confusion and way too ambitious experience. I can't believe this got a pass at the time considering how limited was the Atari 2600 at the time, and how crazy this game is. You had to use two controllers are the same time, if you had only one, the game was impossible.
The glory
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The game has an internal clock, something that no other Atari game has ever done before; to get to the map room, you need to wait a certain amount of time, and then do the puzzle as fast as you can. This is quite clever.
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The game even has music, something almost no Atari game has. It has the main theme from the movies, and the arabic snake charmer song.
The snakes
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The biggest offender is the controls. You need two joysticks to navigate Indiana Jones through the treacherous levels; one is movement and use, the other is moving items. In an era where most games were controlled with a single joystick and a handful of buttons, this two-controller requirement felt incredibly cumbersome and counterintuitive; you need to memorize exactly what each controller does and what button does what, otherwise you may softlock yourself by dropping an item or doing something incorrectly.
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It is very difficult to the point of being annoying. You need a guide, you are forced to read a guide, there is no way to beat the game blind; you will never figure out how to get to the end by skill alone or sheer dumb luck. There is a puzzle where you need to drop something, and if you don't do it correctly, you need to repeat the action over and over.
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The game has tons of confusing puzzles and unforgiving gameplay. One misplaced move can easily lead to a lose minutes, if not an entire hour of progress.
Conclusion
Its ambitious scope, coupled with the two-controller system, confusing gameplay, and numerous technical issues, make it a frustrating game. This should have been a DOS game or a textbased game, it would have worked way better because there would be more keys.