Licensed Metroidvania The Mummy Demastered Makes Death a Mechanic, Not a Setback

The Mummy Demastered arrived in October 2017 as a tie-in to a film that critics had already buried. WayForward Technologies built it anyway. The result is a Metroidvania that understands something most licensed games forget: the source material is raw material, not a cage.

Trailer, via WayForward.

A Prodigium Soldier Under Dr. Henry Jekyll

You play an unnamed soldier of Prodigium, the monster-hunting outfit led by Dr. Henry Jekyll. Russell Crowe’s likeness anchors Jekyll; Sofia Boutella’s anchors Princess Ahmanet, the ancient evil you spend the game pursuing through tombs, forests, abandoned tunnels and the cursed streets of London. The story runs concurrently with the 2017 film, so nothing you do here rewrites the movie’s ending. You are a side character in someone else’s apocalypse, and the game knows it.

Death Is a Mechanic, Not a Setback

Here is the hook. When your soldier dies, Prodigium does not reload a checkpoint. It deploys a fresh recruit. Your predecessor rises as a zombie, carrying every weapon, upgrade and artifact you had collected. The new operative must hunt down that zombified corpse to reclaim the lost equipment before pressing on.

It is a clean loop, and it turns failure into content. Most games punish death with lost time. The Mummy Demastered punishes it with a retrieval mission that has its own geography and its own risk. The mechanic is the best idea in the game.

Two Endings and a Third for the Careful

There are two endings, determined by whether the player survives the escape from the collapsing tomb. A third appears if the player never died on a save file at all, meaning no replacement character was ever created. That third ending is a reward for mastery, and it is the kind of detail that tells you WayForward was paying attention.

Castlevania, Not Super Metroid

Destructoid noted the game resembles later side-scrolling Castlevania titles more than Super Metroid. GameSpot saw influence from Ghosts ‘n Goblins. Both comparisons land. The combat is a shooter-platformer hybrid with puzzle and adventure elements, played from a side view, single player only, with a non-linear map that opens as you progress. Ahmanet commands legions of undead, insects and plague-ridden vermin, and the difficulty curve is unforgiving in the way those older games were.

Release Schedule

Where the 7.4 Lands

The Mummy Demastered is a licensed game that had no business being this good. WayForward took a film that arrived dead and built a tight, punishing Metroidvania around a death mechanic that most studios would have treated as a nuisance.

The weaknesses are real. The game leans on the film’s visual identity, which means its world is only as interesting as a 2017 franchise launch that nobody asked to revisit. The Castlevania and Ghosts ‘n Goblins comparisons cut both ways: they place the game accurately, and they also admit it is not inventing much.

What matters is the retrieval loop. A licensed tie-in that turns your own corpse into a boss encounter is doing something smarter than its source. The 7.4 is fair. It is a good game attached to a bad movie, and it never pretends otherwise.

game review · licensed games · Metroidvania · Nintendo Switch · The Mummy Demastered · WayForward