I never got to play MediEvil when I was a young lad with an original Playstation. Its focus on zombies, ghouls, and a general spooky atmosphere was a bit too much for me to handle, as I was what one might have called a "wuss." Later, I discovered that the game was about as scary as the Beetlejuice cartoon, but by that point, I was already blowing up cars in Grand Theft Auto 3 and wasn’t about to go back to my dusty old PS1.

This remake has now given me the chance to experience this creepy little action-platformer that I missed out on as a cowardly youth. Although, if this remastered version of MediEvil is truly as faithful to the original as it claims, then it seems like my younger self didn’t miss much by skipping this bone-headed adventure.

Spooky, Scary Skeletons

MediEvil takes place in the fantasy kingdom of Gallowmere, where the legends speak of the great hero Sir Daniel Fortesque who led the royal army against the nasty wizard Zarok and his forces of evil. He fought bravely and gave his life to help defeat these fiends and bring about a new era of peace and prosperity. Of course, that’s not exactly true. Either due to historical revisionism, misinformation, or blatant lying the actual details of what went down that fateful day have been distorted, as Fortesque barely set foot onto the battlefield before he was insta-killed by an arrow to the eye.

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Fast forward a 100 years later, and Zarok has returned, spreading an evil green mist that turns villagers and children into ax-wielding maniacs and raises the dead from their graves. Fortunately, one of those dead happens to be the aforementioned Fortesque, who awakens as a skeletal figure who’s short an eyeball. Now given a second chance at life - or undeath - he sets out to stop Zarok once and for all and prove that he is worthy of those false legends. It's not the deepest story, but Fortesque comes across as a likable hero, which gives you enough reason to want to march him forward towards victory.

A Gorgeously, Ghoulish Gallowmere

The presentation of MediEvil is pretty delightful, and Sony couldn’t have released this game at a better time. It’s tailor-made for Halloween, with jack-o-lanterns, bats, tombstones, witches, and many other iconic staples of late Autumn. It feels like what would have happened if 90s-era Tim Burton had made a game, especially since Fortesque looks like a goofy one-eyed Jack Skellington.

The remastered graphics are beautiful, although I still feel like the Spyro Reignited Trilogy remains the pinnacle of the recent Playstation-era revivals, at least in terms of looks. Still, MediEvil has some good textures and lighting effects, and some of the animations look delightfully cartoony and silly. There are also some neat touches here and there, like how a stone face named, Jack Of The Green, seems to be animated in a stop-motion style. That might just be a limitation of this being built off an older game, but regardless of whether or not it was a creative choice, I thought it was a highlight.

Beware Of The Hauntingly Horrible Camera!

Like most remakes and remasters, MediEvil aims to stay as true to the original game as possible. Unfortunately, that might have been a mistake. Game design has evolved and improved drastically over the last two decades, and much like its main character, MediEvil feels like a relic of a thankfully bygone era.

The most egregious and irritating example of this is undeniably its awful camera. Iffy third-person cameras were somewhat accepted back in the early days of 3D gaming as developers were still figuring out how to use the technology. Developer Other Ocean reportedly rehauled the original's wonky camera system to make it more palatable, yet it still only lets us view the game as well as a one-eyed skeleton.

There were countless moments when I was running around a level only for the camera to suddenly change angles and leave me disorientated, sometimes cutting to a black screen for a split-second before doing so. Backtracking through a level would often have the camera facing me, which meant I couldn’t see that I was about to run into offscreen enemies who would take a big portion of my health, or that I was about to walk skull first into a wall.

Plays Like A Re-Animated Corpse

Some archaic gameplay decisions are likely holdovers from 1998, and they don't quite work nowadays. The combat feels button-mashy and loose with little strategy added in. This isn’t helped by the absolute lack of a proper lock-on option to target your enemies or a dodge roll to avoid the constant cheap attacks. There's a firefly-esque creature known as a Wisp that is supposed to circle around objects of interest or the enemy that you’re centered on, yet this doesn’t help in any way, leaving Sir Daniel often flailing his sword around like a lunatic. And if any of these problems happen to cause you to die, there are no checkpoints to restart from, so you have to play the entire level all over again.

MediEvil is hypothetically a platformer, but the jumping feels too heavy and imprecise. Trying to line up your landing is a hassle, which is only made worse by the camera. As an added bonus, since this is a game from the 32-bit period where most developers made water an instant death because it was too hard to graphically render, wading into a slightly deep swamp or pond is a good way to immediately reduce your health bar to zero. Maybe an undead skeleton wouldn’t be swimming like Michael Phelps, but at least let him float or something.

There are some good points to MediEvil. Some of the side quests are fun, like finding some sheet music for an organ-playing ghost or a missing part for a spider-like harvest machine. I mostly enjoyed the voice-acting, which sounds like it could have come straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. Some collectibles unlock new weapons, and the remake has some added content that you can do after you've defeated Zarok to earn some fun bonuses. Sadly, I don't think I'm going to be a completionist when it comes to this game.

Sometimes Dead Is Better

3D games have come a long way since the halcyon days of the 1990s, and MediEvil retains most of the early mistakes that game devs made back then. I fully understand why people like it, as its visual style and theme are incredibly charming, but there's a reason why a lot of PlayStation and Nintendo 64 games don't hold up these days, as modern developers now know tricks and techniques to make titles like this feel smoother and a whole lot less frustrating. The rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia can be a powerful filter. I still have a fondness for the awful Phil Hartman-voiced platformer Blasto, so I can completely understand why many will pick this up to relive a small piece of their childhood.

However, with its horrible camera and antiquated gameplay design, MediEvil proves that sometimes, it's better to leave some things dead and buried.

A PlayStation 4 copy of MediEvil was purchased by TheGamer for this review. MediEvil is now available on the PlayStation 4.

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