If you’ve never heard of the original Xibalba, that’s not too surprising. The 2014 browser game from Phobos Lab is a weird little artifact of its era, a chonky retro styled Doom clone premised around the Mayan underworld. The blocky aesthetic exists alongside Oculus Rift functionality, allowing players to immerse themselves in the weirdly blended aesthetic of New World iconography, nineties era first person shooters, and the spooky ambient music of Andreas Lösch. ModRetro’s decision to bankroll a Nintendo 64 version of this game adds another level of eerie recursion to the whole concept, creating a demake that feels like a delightful, disturbing trip from a parallel universe.
It certainly helps that Dominic Zablewsky seems like a genuinely sweet and enthusiastic guy. As he tells it in the game’s instruction manual, Xibalba was mostly just a demo for his JavaScript game engine, and not even a “real” game in and of itself. Building it up to something worthy of the fifty-dollar asking price required, among other things, that Zablewsky rewrite the entire game in the C programming language. This is the kind of ambitious task a programmer takes on only if they have genuine passion and curiosity, and Zablewsky’s enthusiasm bleeds through every one of Xibalba 64’s seventeen levels.
What really sells this title as something special is how despite the sheer sense of scale of this world, we ultimately know surprisingly little about it. The story as outlined in the instruction manual is vague and cryptic. So is the opening crawl that prefaces each level, eerie, ominous poetry about the nameless protagonist’s descent into this world, culminating with an equally strange encounter with a god and a ray of light.
We never really do find out what exactly was going on, causing the entire text to read like a nightmarish fever dream. Even Zablewsky’s flawed English goes a long way to maximizing the vibe. It’s not always entirely clear what certain technical instructions mean, for example, but in a game this simple, there are only so many ways to interpret them. Who’s telling us these instructions anyway? The shamans? The tree monsters? The robots? A disembodied voice somewhere? Not knowing just makes it that much creepier.
Even getting lost is just an excuse to take in some of the details, trying to figure out what exactly is going on with this worldbuilding. One of the few technical flaws I noticed in this game was a lack of a map. Although I realized upon further consideration this was a deliberate choice to maintain the immersion, and it works wonders. Especially with the lights out, I consistently felt as if I was wandering through a deeply unsettling place. That I was using a small collection of high-powered weapons to blow up every other living or mechanical thing I found down there just contributed to that sense of unease.
The actual gameplay of Xibalba 64 is nothing new, not just compared to Xibalba but relative to Doom clones in general. In some ways it’s beneath the capabilities of the M64. There’s no vertical shooting for example. Again, though, the simplicity of the overall game design is what makes it much easier to focus on the smaller details. This isn’t a game about shooting monsters, even if it’s difficult to finish any given maze without killing everything in the level. It’s a game about being tested, or judged, by who or what, it’s hard to say.
This as much as anything else nails the retro gaming experience. Why do we play games at all, really? Why play Nintendo 64 games instead of titles on new, shinier consoles? It’s not just the nostalgia factor, it’s about that spiritual connection with other fans. Zablewsky nails that vibe long before the end credits, expressing immense appreciation to the Nintendo 64 homebrew community for all their help in getting him to figure out how to make this game work. Whether as the disembodied prologues or just the guy who uses the end credits to write in little hearts directed to his fiancé, Zablewsky is a real person, and Xibalba 64 is his genuine labor of love.
Not to suggest that the main value of Xibalba 64 is its connection to Zablewsky. There’s a lot of replay value in here, from extra difficulty settings to loads of secrets and cheat codes. This isn’t even getting into the multiplayer options, from a co-op mode in the main campaign to a four-player bug hunt or, for that real nineties magic, a deathmatch to the last person standing, with enough options to change up gameplay to keep it spicy without being overwhelming. This is the kind of game you can play at parties. Nerdy parties, perhaps, but Xibalba 64 is the kind of game that makes you proud to be a nerd. It just feels really considerate, right down to the bevy of customization options.
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