Every few years, a core childhood memory resurfaces and I find myself tracking down some weird PlayStation game that my brother and I were obsessed with but never actually finished playing. I search online for a red and black PS1 demo disc featuring a pink-haired wild child taking on pigs and ass-like trees. I discover from the search results that the game I’m looking for is the 1997 platform game Tomba!, and am overcome with nostalgia. Then I forget about it altogether, and the cycle repeats itself.
So you can imagine my surprise when a trailer suddenly appeared earlier this summer announcing that Limited Run Games was re-releasing Tomba! for modern consoles with all of its wacky charm. Tomba! Special Edition is available digitally for PS5, Nintendo Switch, and PC, with a physical version, a series of plush toys, and a themed NEO S controller (pre-orders are sadly sold out) on the way. And finally playing through it almost 20 years after its original release, I found Tomba! to be even more insane than I remembered.
The player character, Tomba, is a feral child who lives on the outskirts of society, hunting wild boars and sleeping under the stars. One day, his peace is disturbed when a group of rogue pigs attack, wreaking havoc and stealing his grandfather’s gold bracelet. To retrieve it, Tomba travels to a nearby town to find and defeat the evil pig leader. Along the way, he meets a series of quirky characters who will guide him on his mission, but only after completing them.
This is a 2.5D platform game, meaning that most of the game behaves like a two-dimensional side-scroller, but you can occasionally move into the background or foreground to explore the map more deeply. Tomba! Special Edition hasn’t changed much from the original game. The graphics are still PS1 polygonal, and the controls can feel clunky. However, there are some convenience additions. Specifically, the rewind feature. This is very useful, since the game is pretty tricky at some points. I found myself needing multiple tries to get certain moves right.
Nearly every part of the story and its environment oozes absurdity. Tomba can climb walls, swing on branches, jump with superhuman abilities, store items (including living things) in his stomach and spit them out when he needs them later. As mentioned before, there is a butt tree that is said to represent a peach, but when Tomba jumps onto it and squeezes it, a cloud of magical gas erupts. He encounters a village of dwarves, but is only able to communicate with them after jumping onto the heads of several dwarves and learning their language. In another village, everyone has been turned into a rat, and for some reason, they are all upset by the disappearance of a baby rat who never actually became a human.
Limited run game
One of the most memorable areas is definitely the Mushroom Forest. This place is full of creepy, clown-like anthropomorphic flowers and mushrooms that will give Tomba a certain disease if he jumps on them. One makes Tomba laugh out loud, and the other makes Tomba cry, and the crying is very unsettling. To be honest, it scared me to death the first time it happened. Tomba infected with both mushroom diseases cannot handle weapons and will wave his arms around and cry if you try to attack him.
Overall it’s a surprisingly complex game, and visually impressive thanks to its bright colours, but the confusing map layout can mean many of the challenges can be hard to complete. The boss fights are particularly frustrating, as instead of just punching and killing evil pigs you have to capture them one by one and toss them into a bag… but the bag is floating and, most of the time, rotating.
Tomba! is often infuriating, but fun to revisit. It’s consistently silly, and the soundtrack hits you with nostalgia from the moment the steel drums start. (The Tomba! Special Edition includes both the original soundtrack and a remastered version, and both are excellent.) With the release of the Special Edition, it’s clear why Tomba! has stayed in my memory so long: I can say I’ve never played another game as great as this one.
