Am Madness is a somewhat difficult game for me to review. It’s released as a retro revival type game, taking it’s inspiration from ZX Spectrum classics like Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner, intending to capture the spirit of those titles but bring it into the modern age.
The reason that I find it difficult to review, is that I am not of that era of gaming. I don’t have any fond memories of that computer, so when I play a game that is intending to capture the essence of that period of gaming, it doesn’t click with me, I just don’t have the nostalgia.
There is perhaps one benefit though, I have no rose-tinted glasses, and I can approach these games as a true neutral. On the surface, Am Madness is a standard platformer game, in which the approach is to gather up all the keys on a screen, which opens up a portal to the next screen. Slightly underneath the surface, you’ll realise that this is an extremely tough game, it takes no prisoners.
Each screen is jam packed with enemies, with the keys placed in extremely awkward situations, making it very hard to grab them without being touched by an enemy, which is an immediate kill. Some levels have other hazards, like fire on the ground, which also kills you. The one saving grace, is that the developer patched out an earlier feature which also had falling from too great a height kill you too. Whilst I understand that did happen in game of that era, it made some levels too difficult, the not fun kind of difficult.
Luckily, with the aforementioned change, I think this game falls just on the right side of difficult. Yes, it’s extremely hard, and yes, it can be extremely frustrating but the game still remains fun. It manages to pull you in, and make you want to get through each screen, learning the patterns until ultimately you can get through, and get that little rush of endorphins from doing so.
From a visual perspective, I like how it looks. The graphics are nice and clean, and there’s it’s always obvious where you need to go and what you need to do. The one caveat to this is the text graphics, they look really out of place and could do with being ‘retrofied’ to fit the rest of the games design. Additionally, I’m not a huge fan of the music. It’s relaxing to an extent, but it just didn’t click with me.
Am Madness additionally features a bit of an unnerving story underneath, each level hints at you being chased by some kind of devil, and things ramp up accordingly. It’s a nice addition, and I’m glad the developer didn’t just stick with the bare minimum of game design.
Ultimately, I quite like Am Madness. It may be extremely difficult and at times outright frustrating, but it has a certain charm and earnestness to it that I really enjoy. I would recommend this to anyone that wants to spend an hour swearing at their screen and smashing their controller, and support a small developer whilst their at it. You can purchase the game on Steam here.
If you liked this, check out some of my other retro revival reviews, such as Zool Redimensioned.
