The games we play when we’re young absolutely do shape our appreciation of gaming when we’re older. If you had asked me when I was about 14 what the best game in the world was, the answer would have been easy. Bubble Bobble, and obviously that’s still scientifically true, but the reality is that game that I spent the most time playing would have been different. That would have been Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond’s Head Over Heels, an isometric puzzle/platform game that was very much of its time.
The late 1980s were the golden age for this kind of game, matching up the limited capabilities of cheap 8-bit computers with some pretty snazzy visuals.
Head Over Heels was a superb game for its time, but honestly, the other reason why it was my obsession was because the family computer at the time was the not-so-mighty Amstrad PCW 8256, Alan Sugar’s take on a home word processor and not much else. It’s frankly a bit of a miracle that there were any games at all for the PCW, but Head Over Heels was easily the best of them. No, there was no version of Bubble Bobble, much as that made 14-year-old me quite unhappy. But I digress.
Honestly, while there was a time where Head Over Heels was my absolute obsession, it’s been a long time since I’ve travelled back to the world of two canine-looking chums looking to head off the evil ambitions of the Blacktooth empire by liberating a series of worlds, one isometric perspective room at a time.
Head Over Heels cast you as Head (technically Headus Mouthion) and Heels (Footus Underium), two vaguely dog-like aliens who have distinct abilities that get you through each of the game’s single screens.
Head can jump in a high arc and has a limited supply of donuts he can fire at enemies to freeze them in place, while Heels jumps lower but is much faster and has a bag that can be used to pick up a single in-screen item to move it around the screen, effectively creating platforms to reach higher areas.
The two heroes start separated from each other, but when they’re together they can combine to form Head Over Heels with both of their powers available, though some clever room design – and vanishing bears, it’s best not to think too hard about the plot – means that many of the game’s kingdom levels see them split up again.
When you’re “remaking” a classic game, there’s usually two approaches that are taken. Either it’s remade in a way that makes it virtually indistinguishable from emulation – it’s just the game, nothing else – or you “improve” it with new more modern game design ideas, player-friendly features and perhaps a slight stylistic upgrade or two.
It’s the latter path that the small team at Rusty Pixels and Ogre Games have opted for. While the look of Head Over Heels is mostly classic, right down to the possibly-now-treasonous Prince Charles as a Dalek (no, really), even though my brain insists it should all be in glorious green screen colour, the Deluxe version adds not only a new planet to explore, but also a whole host of optional add-on rooms with chickens in them.
Why chickens? I suspect the answer there is “why not chickens?”, but in the case of Head Over Heels Deluxe, it’s partly to act as another collectible – there are 32 chickens in total to find – but also so the developers could play around with level editing software to create their own room puzzles.
Some chickens are just a matter of lining up your jumps properly and avoiding the obvious and sometimes not-so-obvious traps to get them, while others are trickier puzzles to work out. You don’t have to collect the chickens, because the core game is still there, but you can trade chickens for additional lives, and you’ll need them.
Head Over Heels Deluxe can be quite punishing if you’re not familiar with it, and even if you are. The nature of these kinds of isometric puzzles is that it can be slightly tricky working out the perspective, especially as each character doesn’t have a floor shadow.
As such, you’re never 100% sure where you are if you’re jumping around, which you will be a lot. One tip here: Play with a D-Pad, not an analogue stick, because this is a game about precise jumping in four cardinal directions, and an analogue stick will often float to the diagonals, screwing up your precise jumping plans.
The Deluxe version does add some tweaks, including the option for upping the play speed, because the original ran about as fast as most 8-bit games. It may sound illogical, but trust me, switch it back to the slower classic speed, because Normal (or Fast or Turbo) are like hard modes unto themselves, especially when you’re learning how the game’s physics work. You can always return to the faster movement modes later on if you fancy a bit of a challenge.
Speaking of challenge, one really clever tweak here is the difficulty setting modifications on board. I figured this would just be a heaping of extra lives, and while you do get a few, it also alters room structures, so easy mode adds platforms or lessens enemy numbers to make it simpler, while hard ups the ante considerably.
That’s a nice way to make what is a slightly punishing older title more accessible to newer gamers, and not one I’d expect in a remake to speak of. It’s clear just how much love for the original that the developers had, because that difficulty balancing is spot on without making the game too easy.
The developers also promise even more classic visual modes – so maybe my beloved green screen visuals might return to me — and steam saves, though at launch neither is present.
The latter is more troublesome, because at the time of review while you can use the in-game fish (another collectible) to create temporary restart points, they only last as long as you keep the game running. That’s very classic in intent, but a tad frustrating for a 2025-era game.
To their credit, looking at the Steam forums the developers are aware of the issue and will be patching in proper Steam cloud saves directly, which should make Head Over Heels: Deluxe a lot more accessible to more gamers. There’s apparently a Switch version in the making as well later this year, though hopefully it won’t rely on having a Switch Online subscription to keep saves permanent. I guess we’ll see later on.
Still, this is an old-school game with an old-school heart, even if it has been expanded out to an astonishing 540 rooms to find and explore from the original’s 300-odd locations. Not every room is a new puzzle, with some just linking corridors to move through, but there’s a lot of content here to explore.
The pace is not fast, but the game will merrily kill you off with simple obstacles over and over again, and I could totally see some gamers bouncing off it hard due to those combined factors. It absolutely tickles my nostalgia gland, however.
I should note as well that if you do go looking for Head Over Heels on Steam, you’ll find not one but two games; there’s the slightly older Retrospec remake, which slavishly follows the original but is (in my experience) a little buggy, and then this new Rusty Pixels/Ogre Games Deluxe version. Some sources suggest that the Retrospec version is unofficial; I’ve got no information on legitimacy there one way or the other.
Head Over Heels: Deluxe also runs like a charm on the Steam Deck, and if you’d told 14-year-old me that I could spend a weekend lying on a sofa playing Head Over Heels, he frankly never would have moved ever again. Maybe it’s a good thing that the Deluxe Remake has taken so long to appear.
