Pandemonium is a great game, and really kind of a gem. It's also hard as hell, at least at some parts. If you want to play this, you could either do the Playstation, Sega Saturn or PC version. The Playstation version is pretty choppy due to hardware limitations, so I strongly recommend the PC version (I haven't tried the Saturn one). Unfortunately, as with many old games, it's not entirely compatible, BUT you can get it running perfectly without music. There's an update for the video card and if you install that you can get it going in five minutes. I tend to play games without music so it didn't bother me, but the music files are actually freely available in the game files as MP3s so you can just play them in the background while you play if you insist. There's also a file that tells you how to change the bitmap of Nikki the girl's face with very specific instructions. Weirdly, there is not one for Fargus, the court jester. Why did the developers think this is so important they put specific instructions in there on how to do it? I have no idea.
When you actually start playing this, you will probably notice that it feels a lot like Crash Bandicoot, but kinda generic. In fact I remember this being a generic, easy platformer because I stopped around level 3. After level 3 the difficulty gets much more hardcore, in fact this game is actually harder than Crash Bandicoot. In Crash Bandicoot you can do a casual playthrough and then up the difficulty if you want to get 100% completion. Simply completing levels in Pandemonium! is somewhat of a nightmare at times. The last part of the last stage is infuriatingly difficult and cruel because there is wind that knocks you back.
You can use the password system and also go back to previous levels to farm extra lives (Which are ankhs for no apparent reason), so the game is more than a little bit forgiving, but still, expect to die and die a lot until you understand the game mechanics fully. Further, there are times when you must transform into a creature and understanding how the creature's ability works is not always clear. You get a rhino-type creature at one point and the only way to damage enemies is to run into them, but the animation doesn't make that obvious. I died about five times trying every button combination seeing how to gore the enemies until I realized you're just supposed to walk into them. There's also a turtle that defends itself by holding down to hide in its shell, and again, this is just something you will probably discover by accident because the game doesn't tell you.
Later stages feel much more like Sega Saturn games, particularly Sonic the Hedgehog. I love the airship levels as they are both difficult and creative. The stages where you are flying through wind are very much like the NiGHTS series and a ton of fun to play. In fact Efreet Palace is probably one of my favorite game levels in any video game ever. There are heart containers hidden in the world, but you're unlikely to find many of them without looking it up because of how well hidden they are.
You can pick between Nikki and Fargus to play as, but Nikki feels like the obvious choice because she can double jump. Double jumping has to be timed perfectly, though, or it won't register, which can end your game pretty quickly. The final boss is brutally difficult and slightly broken. It's fun once you figure it out, but until then it's an absolute nightmare and I had to try 20 times before I got the pattern down, though technically you could get lucky and beat him really quickly by accident since you're using a cannon weapon that sometimes locks him in a loop where he takes damage.
I recommend this despite the installation problems because it's really the only way to play the PC version, and the PC version's game play is superior to the Playstation version due to the graphics and frame rate.
