Exhumed

Description

Exhumed, known as PowerSlave in North America, sends a lone commando into Karnak after alien forces seal the city and overrun its tombs, temples, mines, swamps, and forgotten passages. The setting trades the usual industrial corridors for Egyptian stonework, cursed chambers, mummies, Anubis soldiers, scorpions, spirits, and the insectoid Kilmaat, with the spirit of Ramses guiding the campaign from beyond death.

The gameplay provides a FPS with adventure progression that would become common in later decades. It features weapons, jumping, swimming, artefact abilities, and repeated returns to earlier stages. You move through connected levels from a world map, collecting powers that open new routes, reveal dolls, and push the campaign toward different endings. Lobotomy Software’s SlaveDriver engine gives the Saturn a fluid, purpose-built shooter showcase, with texture-mapped environments. Due to the PAL version preceding the NTSC releases by several months, the hidden 6 player mini game Death Tank in the US and Japanese releases was unfinished and missing from this version.

Its lineage is complicated, because the title differs meaningfully across Saturn, PlayStation, and PC. The PC release is closer to a conventional corridor shooter, while the Saturn version is the one most remembered for its exploratory, ability-gated structure, the quality that later players naturally compare with early 3D Metroid-style design. Lobotomy then used its SlaveDriver technology to bring Duke Nukem 3D and Quake to Saturn (along with Death Tank Zwei), making Exhumed both a strong game in its own right and the technical foundation for two of the machine’s most respected shooter conversions. Contemporary reception respected its speed, atmosphere, and technical nerve, though it never achieved the commercial profile of the bigger PC shooter names it stood beside. Retrospectively its reputation has grown substantially, with collectors and Saturn specialists now treating it as one of the system’s defining original action games, praised for its level design and engine work despite marked by the period’s awkward controls and the occasional burden of backtracking.