Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan

Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan is one of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of video games everywhere. This game is a thematic ripoff of Montezuma's Revenge (copyright Parker Brothers, 1984) and has you running around various American temples and things fighting off various baddies with a whip (so we're ripping off Amblin Entertainment too, huh). Controls are sort of well polished, and the game "works", but only in the most limited senses. There's a plethora of technical defects. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature. PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for. While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this game was never accepted on the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 7 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. You're forced to sign a highly questionable yet legally unenforceable End User License Agreement... for such a relatively low effort, low quality game this comes across more as a delusion of grandeur than anything else. This agreement includes questionable requirements that may attempt to revoke consumer law protections that gamers expect to have, which is also highly problematic. Developers must learn they are here to serve gamers, not control them. I had my cat walk over the keyboard while the EULA was displaying, which fixed that problem for me. Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan has the utterly unrealistic, near delusional price of $10 USD (for pixelcrap!!!), for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. [b][quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/quote][/b]Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.

良くできてるステージクリア型（ちょっとメトロイドヴァニア）アクション。 内容はデモムービーのまんま。 BGMもチップチューン風。 思ってたのと一緒！ 難易度は易しい方だと思う。（自分比） 特定のステージを除いてチェック（セーブ）ポイントも多めで、難しい！　って思う箇所があっても回復アイテム大量持ち込みで、ある程度ゴリ押しできる。 クリアにかかった時間は9時間弱。 とにかく全てにおいてちょうどいい。 ただしSteam版は日本語がないので、日本語で遊びたい方は PS4 or Switch で。 （セリフ量多め。おそらくどうでもいいやり取りを一杯やってる感じ。私、英語、読めない） [spoiler]と書きましたが、過去バージョンに日本語が入ってます。過去バージョンで遊ぶ方法は調べれば出てきますが、自己責任で！[/spoiler]

游戏底子是不错的，但能否给加个地图？才打到第四张图，想跑回去拿骷髅但有的地方已经有点记不清了

Graphics are good. Platforming and control responsiveness is OK but not very tight. Level design is OK for what the game has to work with. Progression is very predictable. The main 5 buttons (attack, jump, use item, confirm, and cancel) CANNOT be remapped if you use keyboard, though for some reason the other buttons (movement keys, item swap) can be. There are some weird choices about how inventory progression is managed. The bulk of your inventory is consumable items, which can mostly be picked up for free in dungeons. For potions, if you collect a consumable, save, and then die, the potion respawns but you keep the one in your inventory, so there's incentive to spam that unfortunate combo to pick them up. On the other hand, for bombs, they respawn on their own every 7 seconds... since you often don't know where to use a bomb to uncover a secret passage, you end up letting your character stand on the bomb location for 63 seconds straight into order to refill your inventory! Since they respawn on their own, might as well just fill it up instantly. You spend an awful lot of the game picking up jewels for money. The jewels are handled well visually, but ultimately there's very little do actually DO with the money, and once you realize that, the game starts to feel a little empty. Ultimately... meh.

Кльова гра. Спочатку, почитавши відгуки, боявся брати та спочатку, коли запустив, мені не дуже сподобалось. Але чим далі грав тим більш затягувало. В ній і справді є тий пригодницький дух як у старих іграх як Pitfall (Sega Genesis), Donald Duck Maui Mallard aбo Indiana Jones. Та і сюжет мені сподобався, я хотів би зробити переклад бо тексту як для такої гри доволі багато.

Sydney Hunter (not to be confused with Sydney Sweeney or Sidney Zitbag) is the archaeologist from a series of homebrew games for older gaming systems. "Curse of the Mayan" is the first one that has been made for digital download, it's much bigger and more elaborated than these ones, but still with the same retro sensibilities. Basically it's a metroidvania-esque platformer where you are in this hub world (a Mayan pyramid) and have to find hidden crystal skulls as tokens to open the way to the areas where the cursed Mayan gods reside and defeat them. Every area also has new items and weapons that can open up exploration even more, for a satisfying gameplay loop where you're incentivized to look into every nook and cranny, while besting deadly traps and picking up gems for buying other useful stuff (hey, ancient Mayans have to eat too). The C64-styled pixel graphics (but with more enhancements such as parallax scrolling) are quite good and so are most of the chiptune BGM, the dialogues between Sydney, the Mayans and the gods are fairly funny and full of references without being obnoxious, the controls are precise, buttons for changing weapon and usable items on the fly are optimal, and there's some QoL features like being able to exit a stage you already completed. Unfortunately there's still a few old-school frustrating aspects, like some insta-kill attacks from mid-bosses, some areas that lack save points for no real reason, and a full-fledged mini-game (actually a Sydney Hunter game for Intellivision!) required to unlock the final area, that is a major source of frustration with its pixel-perfect jumps. Also keyboard keys can't be remapped and I found that the game has a hard time recognizing certain Xbox gamepads, and there are no volume controls. But in general COTM is well put together, fun, has plenty of secrets and for an optional challenge one can try to find all of the hidden treasure and complete the infernal mini-game. Recommended if you like retro-style games with a hard but fair challenge!

Not fun. Bad control mapping settings.