Seal of the Pharaoh is a first-person dungeon-crawler with a tomb-raiding ancient Egyptian theme. It was developed by System Sacom and published in 1994, exclusively for the 3DO, by ASK Kodansha in Japan and Panasonic in North America.

The game uses pre-rendered graphics throughout – except for the UI elements – which dates it quite badly. As you walk through the tomb, you step from tile to tile, and turns and steps are animated as you move. Monsters will frequently pop up (usually from out of the ground, but not always), and you must use your weapon to quickly destroy them.

Your health indicator is not shown by default – you press the ‘L’ button to display it – but I think it would’ve been better to make it smaller and show it on-screen at all times. When an enemy is on-screen, their health is shown adjacent to your health indicator, and you must keep hitting them until they’re done for. At the same time, you need to protect your own health by topping it up if it gets too low. This is done by activating a pop-up menu, from which you can scroll through your items and use any health potions you’ve found.

You’ll also find other useful items as you explore, like maps, weapon and shield upgrades, and special items that are required to solve certain puzzles.

Occasionally you’ll meet strange characters – like the red starfish-like being with eyes, and a bright pink scorpion – who are actually helpful (and who you’re not supposed to attack, otherwise you’ll scare them away), and they will speak to you to give you hints or open secret doors for you.

The on-screen maps are next to useless because they’re so small as to make them difficult to decipher, and also there’s no indication of your current position, so you may as well be holding them upside-down…

The monsters you encounter are relatively unimaginative, but they do increase in difficulty as you progress, so you have to keep an eye on your health during battles. You can also retreat from battle if you need to recover, but returning to the same location will trigger the same battle again, until the monster is finally beaten.

The music in Seal of the Pharaoh is very repetitive, and the gameplay is too simple for its own good. Combine that with the dated, almost featureless graphics – and the lack of graphical variety – and you’re left with a plain-looking game that lacks atmosphere.

Seal of the Pharaoh could have been a half decent game, but the overall feeling when playing is that it is lacking a fair bit.

More: Seal of the Pharaoh on Wikipedia