#oneaday Day 381: Saboteur!

I happened to stumble across something interesting on the Switch eShop recently — and I really do mean stumble, because I hadn't read anything about it anywhere online.

It's a game called Saboteur!, and it's apparently an official remake of a supposedly classic ZX Spectrum game — so official, in fact, that the original creator Clive Townsend was responsible for it.

This is no straight remake, mind; while the opening section of the game is pretty much a note-for-note remake of the ZX Spectrum original, once you beat this part — which would have ended the game in its original incarnation — a whole other section opens up, complete with dialogue, puzzles, object manipulation and all sorts of new mechanics. But still presented like it's a Spectrum game.

This is a fascinating game. I'm about a third of the way through the new section on the lowest difficulty right now; there are nine difficulty levels, each of which make a fairly significant difference to the overall structure of things by adding a lot more locked doors and switches to manipulate as well as making the enemies stronger and time limits tighter. I'm definitely going to continue exploring it, as I'm having a lot of fun with it — and when I'm done, there's a sequel, too.

I'll save detailed thoughts for when I've played the game in more detail, but suffice to say if you're at all interested in one of the earliest examples of a Western-developed stealth game with elements of open-structure 2D platforming, you'll want to give Saboteur! a look.


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