Return To Blacktooth: A Head Over Heels Adventure Review (Commodore Amiga)

More than 35 years ago, in 1989, Colin Porch finished programming the Amiga and Atari ST versions of Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond’s 1987 classic Head Over Heels and immediately began work on a sequel, which is only now being released, almost 40 years later. Return To Blacktooth is finally here, officially approved by rights holder Atari, and remarkably, playable on real Amiga and Atari ST hardware.

After decades of work, and with support from British indie publisher Thalamus Digital, Porch has delivered a sequel that is nothing short of a love letter to the fans who grew up with Head Over Heels in the Eighties. On the one hand, it is faithful to the vision of the original classic, but on the other hand, it adds fresh ideas that are perfectly in keeping with that vision.

Anyone who loved Head Over Heels back in the day knows why it’s still considered a Britsoft classic. It features some of the best level design you’ll find in an isometric puzzle-platformer and boasts a unique gimmick in the form of its two playable characters.

Head is great at jumping, can move in the air and has a gun that fires doughnuts, while Heels cannot jump but moves swiftly and has a handbag that allows him to pick up and move useful objects. Solve the opening chapter’s maze to reunite the pair, and you can combine them into one entity capable of using all their powers at once.

It’s a genius design, and Return To Blacktooth proves there was always more potential to the gameplay mechanics than could be contained in just one game. There are over 300 screens in the sequel, featuring twists on familiar puzzles – like the first game’s iconic remote control “Prince Charles Dalek” – but also completely fresh ideas, like forcefield barriers and invisible platforms, which expand on the formula in new and exciting ways without ever breaking what worked back in 1987. Most of those screens are completely new, while a few are reused or remixed from the original – which may prove disappointing to some or nostalgic to others, depending on your point of view.

Players who have never tried Head Over Heels before may find these new puzzles a little too challenging. One gets the sense that they were designed with veteran players in mind, and the complexity of the puzzles from the start is comparable to that of the more demanding stages of the original. As such, newcomers may want to play the first game before tackling this one.

However, it’s reassuring to see some concessions made to modern players. There are a generous number of starting lives, much greater than in the first game, and this number can be increased depending on the difficulty level selected. There is also a handy little saving grace that allows one character to transfer some of their lives to the other under certain conditions. All of which gives time-poor retro gamers a much better chance of making it deeper into Blacktooth Castle.

Even with these aides in place, Return To Blacktooth demands dedication from its players. Many puzzles could leave you scratching your head (or heels) for hours, but they are all logical and achievable. Porch hoped that solving them would provide an enormous sense of satisfaction to the persevering player, and there’s no denying how good it feels when a puzzle finally clicks into place. Even if, on occasion, you do bypass one in a way you suspect was never intended.

Only the problems inherent to the isometric view, which can make precision jumps tricky to judge or obfuscate visibility of key platforms, feel a little unfair at times, but this is admittedly a problem with the original game, too.

For this review, we played on a real Amiga and were largely impressed by the execution. Return To Blacktooth runs very smoothly and looks suitably pretty even on basic Amiga models. If you only ever played the first game on 8-bit systems, then you’ll be blown away by how good this looks. You can play with both sound effects and music at the same time, something that wasn’t all too common back in the day.

It can be played easily from either a floppy disk or a hard drive and includes save game functionality, too. The only slight disappointment is the lack of full CD32 controller compatibility. Head plays just fine, with jump on the red button and fire on the blue, but for some reason Heels needs to be controlled with a combination of joypad and keyboard keys. Which will hopefully be updated with a patch in time.