Terra Incognita International

There are things that are better left in the past. Mullets, shell suits, films set in virtual reality worlds. People gave up on them for a reason.

The same can be said for some games. Retro remakes may be all the rage in the labyrinthine corridors of mobile app stores, but that doesn't mean that everything deserves a second chance.

Terra Incognita International is a game you didn't play the first time around, or the second on the iPhone, and you shouldn't play it on the Xperia Play either.

First created on the Net Yaroze, an amateur development platform for the original PlayStation, Terra Incognita International is a third-person action-adventure game in the vein of the Legend of Zelda series.

You guide your bobble-headed Link-a-like through a blocky 3D world, pushing rocks, killing blobs of slime, and collecting keys. You're exploring an island in search of a mythical treasure, and each part of that island is essentially a simple puzzle that you have to solve.

Normally, the puzzle involves little more than rotating the camera so you can see the key you need to progress to the next part of the game. Quite why there are so many free-standing locked doors on an island is never adequately explained.

The controls are jerky and cumbersome, with the shoulder buttons moving the camera and the D-pad letting you waddle about. Combat is so slow that sometimes you don't think you've pushed the right button.

Terra Incognita International was a terrible game 14 years ago, and it's aged badly. It's clumsy, poorly put together, and riddled with translation mistakes and frustrating gameplay. Worse than that, it's little more than a charmless rip-off of Zelda in the first place.

Some things are best left buried in the past, and this game is definitely one of them.