Indiana Jones: The Fate of Atlantis Special Edition Demo

This is a fairly ambitious fan project I’ve been following for years. I must have stumbled upon their Facebook page around 2013 or 2014, maybe earlier. If you’ve been on Dad With A Deck before, you’ll know that I’m a massive fan of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. I play it yearly, sometimes a couple times per year. I even reviewed it. It’s a deadset classic and absolutely worthy of a remaster. Does it need a remaster? I love it as is but I’m not about to say I wouldn’t enjoy a remaster of one of my favourites of all time. It’s one of those games I keep coming back to year in, year out. I’ve got a few thoughts I want to share about the latest Special Edition demo. I installed and played through it on my Steam Deck, Proton is required to launch it and you will need to set your own controls. You can download the demo from their blog page.

The team at Went2Play have been working on a remaster of Fate of Atlantis in a similar vein as the Monkey Island 1 and 2 Special Editions from 2009 and 2010. I’m a fan of both of the Special Editions, especially as they are fully voiced. I know others don’t enjoy them and that’s fine. Fate of Atlantis Special Edition just recently had a new demo released with 2 fully playable sections. We are able to play the entire section of the game from the start, traipsing around Barnett College and finding the statue through to locating Plato’s Lost Dialogue and choosing your path. We can then play the entire Knossos labyrinth section from the Team path. There is obviously still quite a bit of work left to do before the full release, but my initial impression is that this is pretty good. The game captures the same original feel, but with a clear graphical overhaul and a move to a more Curse of Monkey Island or Full Throttle style point-and-click interface.

There was probably no way I wasn’t going to like an updated version of one of my favourite games of all time. Graphically, I think it looks fantastic. It suits the 1940s Indy style very well, my only criticism would be that it needs just a bit more dirt rubbed into it in places. It’s pretty shiny, even in some areas of Knossos. But also I guess the grit that is prominent in the original could be attributed to the nature of the pixel-art style. Shininess aside, the environments look great. They’re familiar, but more detailed. There are a few added extras and Easter eggs throughout. I’ll be doing another play-through to uncover some more, I’m sure. One thing in Knossos is that there are orichalcum beads scattered through some of the rooms and you can use them to power newly added Atlantean lights throughout the labyrinth which I think is a nice touch. Indy’s movement seems pretty natural, there are a few times it seems a little off in some environments but overall I think it comes off pretty good. There was really only a few times I was otherwise a little unimpressed with animations and that was surrounding the gold box that is found in the labyrinth. That seemed just a little too clunky when putting Sophia’s necklace away to find the hidden door to the Atlantis scale-model room. In my play-through, Indy had his back to Sophia when passing over the box and the same happened when Sophia was putting the necklace away. But, there’s plenty of time to polish up those little details. The animations themselves seemed fine, but that particular sequence of events didn’t quite match up.

Being a demo, I did go into it assuming not all the details would be completely finished and polished. We’re still missing a good deal of music, dialogue and some of the animations need a little work. There are fairly large chunks of dialogue missing at this point, but I assume these are either on the way or are planned to be on the way. The music, I would imagine the same is the case. The amount of playable content and the look of the environments alone is very impressive. I’ve quite enjoyed watching this project progress up to this point. It’s taken a few different turns through the years, even with a potential move to being entirely 3D, which was a bit out there. Thankfully, they have persisted with their original presented style and have produced some really great results. There is still a lot of work ahead but I’m really keen to see the final, finished product.