The current flood of game remasters will continue until morale improves. But every revitalized title approaches things slightly differently. Ace Attorney Investigations fills a crucial series gap. Others, like Aero the Acro Bat, aim for a specific nostalgia niche. Tomba—originally rising to prominence on a PlayStation demo disc before spawning two full games—slots somewhere in the middle.

Well-known but still a mystery, famously a pain to accurately emulate: in other words, a perfect candidate for a remaster-slash-technical-showcase. Limited Run Games faithfully recreates the strange charm and technical limitations of the original, but not without a few quirks of its own.

Jungle Jumper

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Tomba’s goofy story ambles along at a relaxed pace, with plenty of room for diversions. Tomba is a pink-haired chaos gremlin in tattered green shorts. Some evil Koma pigs stole his grandpa’s prized beacelet, so now he’s chasing them across the countryside.

Bizarre dialogue and characters complement developer Whoopee Camp’s bright color scheme. And even decades later, I have a Pavlovian response to Tomba’s sound design and score. My ears automatically perk up when I hear the dinner-bell clang of a new quest.

Tomba fixes most of his problems through jumping, grabbing, and throwing his blackjack. Areas are multilayered side-scrollers with 3D elements that occasionally require him to hop into the foreground or background, clambering up walls or clinging to vines. But Tomba isn’t segmented by level. Quests can be completed in any order, even skipped. And few are self-contained to one area, so you’ll need to venture out into the wider world to fulfill them.

While not seamless, one area flows into the next after a loading screen. Residential areas trickle into leafy forests. Rolling hills of fallen leaves flow into a quaint village. The rhythm of smaller milestones building to a larger goal feels like point-and-click adventuring in a platformer’s clothing. But instead of typing out verbs, it’s mostly jumping, throwing, and occasionally selecting an item from an inventory menu. Tomba’s world is made to be moved through.

No Menu Is An Island

Limited Run’s Carbon Engine is the scaffolding that Tomba! Special Edition runs on, but it’s hard to tell which oddities are Carbon Engine quirks and which are natural byproducts of emulation. Visible seams are unavoidable in this kind of remaster, but it often felt like the emulated game and the modern-day wrapper weren’t communicating with each other.

Accessing the title screen options menu only provides the broader toggles: vibration, soundtrack version selection, background color for modern interface elements, and language. I could only find the more granular display options—game window scaling, CRT filters, and borders—after loading the game itself and pressing the right trigger on my Switch controller.

Inconsistent button behavior slightly deflated my fun with Tomba! Special Edition. During gameplay, the Switch’s B button advanced gameplay text and paged through inventory without issue. But in the modernized save screen, the A button confirmed instead. After swapping back and forth, I would back out of a save prematurely or accidentally exit an in-game text box. Those lost moments quickly built up to near-constant annoyance.

The Verdict: Tomba! Special Edition is a faithful, if uncanny, recreation

Tomba! Special Edition is a painstaking tribute to an enduring PlayStation oddity. Its blend of nonlinear gameplay and inventive platforming are just as thrilling as they were on a PlayStation demo disc.

For speedrunners and games preservationists, Tomba! Special Edition is an almost unmitigated victory in the commercial sense: a once-cantankerous title made playable, accessible, and relatively affordable on modern platforms.

Limited Run Games’ inclusion of archival material and developer interviews demonstrates a clear respect for Tomba, even if mild technical hiccups occasionally disrupt the flow.

But for some, even the most detailed recreation of a 1997 title won’t quite feel like enough. Glimmers of a full reimagining peek through the cracks: sprite work for Nintendo Switch button layouts in text boxes, promotional art rendered in full motion in the title menu.

Decades have passed since that first release, with Tomba’s broader ideas slowly seeping into the wider industry. Maybe contemporaries like DoubleShake will whet modern appetites. Either way, I’m glad Tomba wasn’t lost to history. Hopefully this is an opening salvo for older, odder games to get wider releases.

Great