Big Brother Flying Medjed And The King Of Fear’s Curse Review: way cool, but also way too hard

Big Brother Flying Medjed And The King Of Fear’s Curse (空飛ぶメジェドにいさん〜クフ王の呪い〜)—we’ll call it Medjed for short— is a game that makes Flappy Bird look like a walk in the park.

(See: Flappy Bird review: it’s frustrating, dumb, and ridiculously addictive)

But first of, why is there a flying sheet in my game based in ancient Egypt? The answer to that question is that Medjed is actually a character from Egyptian mythology, as you can see here:

Medjed as depicted on an ancient Egyptian scroll

Apparently, Medjed’s appearance was found so comical and amusing by the Japanese people that he has become a meme of sorts, so much that he’s now the star of his own video game. Praise Ra!

While Medjed is a very well made game, as you would come to expect from a Japanese developer, its single greatest flaw is that it’s simply too darn hard.

Pyramid schemes

Medjed is a pretty simple game in theory. You fly through each stage, dodging obstacles and avoiding walls to reach a goal at the end. You get a fixed amount of time to complete each stage, so you have to be quick about it.

Along the way, you’ll find hearts that can be picked up for additional points, stars which grant you invincibility, and miniature pyramids. Each stage has three pyramids to collect, and only upon collecting all the pyramids available on the stage will the game consider it a ‘stage clear’.

The good news is, you don’t have to collect all the pyramids in a single run; you can replay the stage multiple times, and as long as you reach the end goal with a pyramid in hand, it’ll be counted as acquired. You also don’t need to collect all the pyramids to unlock the next stage, so you can always come back and try to get all the pyramids later.