As someone who has been playing video games now for all the years they’ve ever been available, there are times when my nostalgia can create excitement merely at the suggestion of games possibly having something in common with titles I enjoyed back in the day. In the case of Risky Chronicles, the game in question was Montezuma’s Revenge, which I played quite a lot back on my Atari 5200 after getting it for Christmas that year. I guess if you throw what looks like a Mayan pyramid into the game art it grabs my attention, but in this case that just helped to define my degree of upcoming disappointment.

Fitting somewhat into the same classic mold as Montezuma’s Revenge, or perhaps the classic Pitfall to a degree, this is a platformer where you’ll need to deal primarily with traps as well as some enemies on foot. Thankfully you’ll be armed with a trusty pistol, and as long as you’re not irresponsible a reasonable amount of ammo to go with it. That makes your primary concern dealing with the game’s various deadly obstacles, which include saw blades, arrows, mummy arms, and more.

The problem is, none of it is handled well on pretty much any level. The hitboxes on your hero and most things you’ll be working to avoid are simply too large, making death by the mere aura of something deadly your most common foe. This isn’t helped at all by the fact that the game’s assets all look like they were grabbed from an old Flash game, adding it being visually underwhelming to the mix. Throw in the fact that you’ll often need to drop into spaces you can’t see, or even look down at, but will instead be guided by butterflies that are randomly put in place to show you where to fall, and the lack of careful design or proper effort to implement the game more appropriately come shining through. Even among other lackluster and somewhat broken budget platformers out there, this is among the worst.