Maximo - Ghosts to Glory

Saving costs money. Not in-fiction currency for potions or upgrades, but Death Coins handed over to the Grim Reaper himself, who turns up as a business partner rather than an enemy and expects payment before he lets you bank your progress. That single decision tells you more about Capcom's 2001 platformer than any feature list would. Progress here is something you buy, and the price is measured in the corpses you leave behind.

The lineage is Ghosts 'n Goblins, and the debt is paid openly. Maximo's armour shatters in stages until he is fighting undead legions in his boxer shorts, one hit from a restart, exactly as Arthur did fifteen years earlier in two dimensions. Levels are graveyards, swamps and crypts stitched together from tight platforming stretches and combat arenas, with gravestones that keep pumping out zombies until you smash them. Sword work is more considered than the era's usual mashing: a shield bash to break guards, a downward thrust for grounded enemies, a spin attack that costs health to use. Enemies interrupt you if you get greedy.

What separates it from the pack of mascot platformers crowding the PS2's first year is that it is genuinely hard and structured around that hardness. Levels are short. Deaths are frequent. Continues are finite and tracked, and running out sends you back further than you want to go. The camera is the weak link, as it was for almost everything in 2001, and there are drops and rooftop sections where a fixed angle turns a simple jump into a guess. Learn the sight lines and the frustration mostly recedes, though never entirely.

It also looks better than it has any right to. The art direction leans into a stylised, slightly comic grotesquerie — bulbous skeletons, cackling wizards, a hero with a jawline that could open cans — and it has aged far more gracefully than the muddy realism its contemporaries chased. Achille's undead army has real personality, and the death animations still land.

The sequel, Army of Zin, refined the combat and streamlined the punishment. Plenty of people prefer it. But this is the one where the economy of dying is the whole point, where every rescued damsel and every purchased continue is a small negotiation with an entity who has all the time in the world. Few games have made bookkeeping feel this much like dread.