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 First room |  Bomb bags |  Endor? |
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 Taking cover |  Little Shot for Horrors |  Falling too far |
After being sent to Earth with the Lightstone by his father's court wizard to prevent Sarlac obtaining it, Kyle Blackthorne has become a military captain and mercenary. While hitchhiking in the desert of New Mexico one night, he and his trusty shotgun get teleported back to his home planet of Tuul to overthrow Sarlac and claim his rightful place on his father's throne.
Blackthorne (going by Blackhawk in France and Germany) is a Prince of Persia-style cinematic platformer. A bit more realistic than the open-world running and jumping of Super Mario World, you can only take countable steps forward, have a reduced moveset while holding your gun, and will take realistic damage depending on how far you fall. Falling from a ledge twice as high as you are tall will result in damage, falling any further than that will result in instant death upon landing, and there are no powerups in the Super Mario Bros. sense. It's sort of a cross between Prince of Persia, Doom, and The Legend of Zelda in this way. While pure exploration will often yield the solution to a puzzle, some of them are single-use; if you run out of bombs or you collapse too many bridges, you may have to Give Up and start again. This can lead to frustration, especially in the last level, since beta-testing didn't seem to catch a lot of clipping issues here, leading you to become trapped in places you shouldn't have been able to reach.
I rank Blackthorne in amongst my personal favourite Super NES games, which is interesting considering I hadn't even heard of it until 2014. I appreciate how easy it is to commit the first 10 maps to memory and how totally scripted the game is. There's no part of game mechanics that relies on random chance, except maybe the guards' patrolling behaviour and how many times they fire when they see you. Aesthetically, I love the music in the 1st and 3rd levels. The 2nd and 4th take a little getting used to, and could probably have been longer because of how many times they're going to loop. The visuals are on-point Super NES. If you ever wanted an idea of how the "average" Super NES game looked, that would be this.
I don't really have any memories of this game from my childhood because, well, like I said, I didn't know about it until 2014. One interesting thing happens, though; I associate each level with a particular part of it. I can imagine 1/4 of the boys at school going crazy for this game if we'd been half a generation older; I associate this feeling with the Mines level. The Forest level pings my childhood fascination with the Ewok village from Return of the Jedi—I can imagine people living in similarly-hollowed trees in the background scenery. Plus, there's a waterfall back there that is just the greatest damn thing ever. Finally, I associate the Quarry level with the video rental section of the grocery store I used to go to a lot in the mid-'90s. Who knows? Maybe I do have a latent memory of seeing this game being played at their Super NES demo kiosk? How should I know? I was 3 at the time.
8/10, would recommend with reservations. First, the game's colour palette is really dark, to the point I had to increase the brightness on all the screenshots by 10%. Second, the controls are just different enough from Prince of Persia to make people who are familiar with that game fumble over the controls a bit for a few minutes. Third... well... it's a Nintendo-sanctioned shooter game. That means green snot instead of red blood when shots impact. Otherwise, I have no other gripes about this game. The difficulty gets kind of unforgiving in the last 6 or so maps, but you're used to it by the time you get there. It's fairly long as far as Super NES games go, but the 4-character level passwords are easy to remember. Why, I just finished WJTV just this afternoon.
