Before Tomb Raider and off the back of the successful Indiana Jones films, we saw Rick Dangerous released into the wild with his own Indy-inspired, Tomb escaping platformer.
It was released in 1989 on the usual range of home computers successful in Europe at the time, the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, C64 and Amstrad CPC. Here we’re looking at the Amiga version.
Rick Dangerous is a hellishly tricky platform game which sees you work through 4 different locations, and when I saw work, you really have to WORK to get through this game!
Completely by design, Rick Dangerous pulls a hell of a lot of cheap shots on you to stop you from progressing! Right from the off, you’re thrown straight into the action where a boulder (Indiana Jones style) chases you down – Immediately you realise that Rick Dangerous is not a game for the faint-hearted!
But this is where the trouble only begins, from here on in, you have to tackle many conventional enemies and also avoid the many hidden traps. There is no way this is a game you simply just play through on your first few attempts, it is as much a memory game as it is a skilled platformer.
It’s very much a marmite kind of game, Rick Dangerous certainly has its fans, but also its detractors, with many citing its difficulties as the reason it’s an awful game – But just like marmite, the fact it’s just not for some people, it doesn’t make it bad.
Verdict
Rick Dangerous has probably aged better than many games of the era in the sense that it actually has a lot more in common with a lot of modern indie games such as Super Meat Boy and Celeste, in that it is now fairly commonplace to have this approach of going through repeated deaths again and again until you can develop the muscle memory or indeed simply to memorise the levels, to be able to finally beat it.
A classic game nonetheless, Rick Dangerous wasn’t the first frustrating platformer, but it certainly took it to a whole new level.
A lifelong avid gamer and computing enthusiast, Matt has decades of Retro Gaming experience. Now over 40 years old, Matt now even considers himself retro, but fortunately, nobody has developed a Matt emulator (not yet at least!).