Head Over Heels: A remake that’s long overdue a remake

Year: 1987/2003 |Publisher: Ocean/Qubyte Interactive|Developer: Jon Ritman & Bernie Drummond/Retrospec |Original format: ZX Spectrum | Version played: Nintendo Switch

Head Over Heels is the first game I remember really loving. Not just liking, but, as the title itself implies, completely falling in love with. Back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, my dad would occasionally give me a couple of quid and take me into a little games shop in Wakefield where I could choose any game I wanted. This early in life, I didn’t really have games magazines with which to make informed decisions and there wasn’t much word of mouth either. So choices were almost entirely made based on the packaging alone, and in the case of Head Over Heels it was the packaging that called out to me.

The cover art by the legendary Bob Wakelin looked incredible to my child eyes and featured two strange dog-like creatures that instantly captured my imagination. On the reverse of the inlay I saw screenshots of what I’d later come to understand was an isometric style. I’d never seen anything like it at the time and so I imagined it must play differently too. Finally, a back of the box quote from Crash magazine promised, “the most addictive, playable, fun game ever.” Well… There was no way I was leaving the shop without it.

In trying to explain Head Over Heels to people who weren’t there at the time, I’m genuinely concerned I might come across a raving madman, attempting to recall a fever dream. Its world and characters come straight out of the same bizarre collective imagination that powered remarkably abstract Spectrum games like A Day In The Life or Jet Set Willy. It feels like the developers threw whatever they wanted into the game world in order to create the specific gameplay experience they wanted, and worried about how the story fit together later. So your weapon is a hooter that fires donuts, you carry useful items around in a giant handbag, save your progress by collecting a “Reincarnation Fish” and you’ll find giant sleeping dogs called Hush Puppies stacked together to form stairs. This odd world and its weird, dreamlike logic made Head Over Heels instantly appealing as a kid and it’s one of the main reasons it’s stuck with me decades later.

The weirdest part of Head Over Heels is the title characters themselves, Head and Heels. At first glance they seem cute and adorable but the longer you think about what they really are, the weirder they get. While Head is a disembodied floating dog-like head with arms, Heels is an armless dog who crawls along the ground with his unnervingly large feet. Quite why one of them is called Head when the main distinguishing feature of both of them is their giant bonce is a secret known only to their mothers.

What makes Head and Heels really special, though, is the promise that they can eventually join together to form one gestalt creature with all their powers combined. It’s a tantalising prospect, made all the more tempting by the fact that our two playable heroes are kept physically separated right from the start. From the very first screen of the game, you can walk Head into the next room, where he’ll see Heels on the other side of a prison wall, so close but so far from reach. How will you get them back together? This is a question that occupied my every spare thought in 1990…

I don’t believe I ever did reunite them, at least not on C64. But I had a great time trying. The isometric perspective was completely new to me and figuring out how to guide a character in diagonal directions using cardinal controls was a real brain buster all on its own. Just moving from one room to another was a challenge! If I managed to do anything more complex – like climbing the ladder in Head’s room by successfully jumping and turning in mid air three times in a row to collect the rabbit at the top – I felt like I’d conquered videogames themselves.

As my confidence increased, I completed more puzzle rooms and generally had a good time hanging around in this strange world. The ultimate convergence of which is a particularly fun room featuring Head Over Heels’ most infamous NPC. A character so distinct that he guest stars on both the cover art and the loading screen and so incredibly British too; he essentially looks like a Dalek but with the unmistakable head of Prince Charles. Even as a young lad I picked up on the odd mix of cultural references and had played enough games to know this kind of idiosyncratic design was all too rare. I loved it! I also really enjoyed the puzzle itself, which requires Heels to nudge at four orbs like the directions on a joystick to control Prince Charles Dalek and pilot him across an electrified floor so you can position him as a platform and safely jump across to an essential collectible. Brilliant!

Though I never progressed very far in Head Over Heels, its inventive gameplay and outlandish visual design stayed with me. It was my first favourite game, on my first gaming system; impossible to forget. Twenty years later, when I helped choose the games that would adorn games™ magazine’s 100 covers to celebrate its 100^th issue, I championed Head Over Heels and ensured its beautiful loading screen made the cut. Such was the grip it held over me all those years and countless more games later.

Despite its critical acclaim (it got a whopping 98% review from Zzap!64) Head Over Heels barely made it off the 8-bit micros. It got slightly better looking 16-bit ports for the Amiga and Atari ST and then just disappeared like so many other British games as the Japanese console juggernauts steamrolled over the industry in the mid-Nineties.

In 2003, however, Head Over Heels was resurrected by fans in an unofficial remake made freely available online for PC gamers, and somehow this version ended up getting an official release on Nintendo Switch this year. Quite what legal tightrope walks and IP acquisitions were needed to make this release possible, I don’t know, but I’m so glad that there’s finally a way to play this lost classic on consoles/modern hardware. Even if it is a kind of bastardised version…

I actually played the 2003 remake back when it was first released. I was a student living in London and downloaded the release onto one of those giant tower PCs with a bulky VGA monitor. I didn’t have a ton of time to play it in-between studies, student life and new GameCube imports but it sure did bring back memories. I particularly appreciated the new colourised graphics, which respectfully breathed life into the old monochrome world while still retaining its unique charms. I’d long thought that the C64 version could have looked a lot prettier rather than simply replicating the basic visuals of the Spectrum release, so this new version kind of looked the way I always wanted it to.

Oh and you could save your progress too! Although you couldn’t quite do this whenever you wanted… You could only save when you found a Reincarnation Fish, which were used as respawn points in the original game. Nevertheless, a save feature was a handy tool at the time and, alongside my now fully formed puzzle-solving adult brain, this was just what I needed to finally push through those early rooms, reunite Head and Heels, combining them together into one tall creature and exploring the world beyond.

I would always have a nostalgic love for Head Over Heels, one that would never go away, but it was the remake that cemented my love for this game and reassured me that, yes, it wasn’t just a childhood attachment… This actually was a smartly designed and supremely enjoyable videogame that deserved its classic status.

Eighteen years later, the surprise re-release of this obscure remake is a curious one. Retrospec’s unofficial recreation is now a couple of years older than the original Head Over Heels was when this remake first came out in 2003. So while the remake improved upon the 8-bit original in a number of ways, it now finds itself a victim of time and is, in turn, showing its age.

The updated visuals are nicely done, but there’s also an inherent beauty to those classic Spectrum graphics. I can’t help but feel that a full-blooded 2021 remake would show more respect for the original and allow you to switch to the classic presentation, complete with its original sound effects and excellent music. Likewise, I would have liked to be able to switch off the widescreen border featuring the butt ugly new artwork that’s so bad I’ve cropped it out for all the screens in this post.

Mostly, I think there’s a missed opportunity here to help newcomers – and old strugglers like me – actually finish Head Over Heels. Why not allow players to quick-save anywhere rather than only when they collect a rare Reincarnation Fish? An in-game map, like you’d see in a Metroidvania, would go a long way to helping players find their way around this expansive, multi planet world. And a digital manual or even a tutorial wouldn’t go amiss either. I dread to think how newcomers would begin trying to understand the weird logic of this game without all the helpful info that used to come packaged in the box and is now nowhere to be seen.

I’m truly thrilled to see Head Over Heels on a modern console. I honestly never thought I’d live to see the day, and I feel grateful that it’s available in any form. But playing the 2003 remake today really shines a spotlight on how far retro re-releases and remakes have come in the past couple of decades. There’s so much more that could be done with Head Over Heels to help bring its genius to the surface and, you know… I’d quite like to complete this game before I die. Until that elusive user-friendly remake arrives, I’m going to assume it probably never will and just keep trying. See you in another eighteen, Head and Heels!

FIVE LITTLE THINGS ABOUT HEAD OVER HEELS THAT I RATHER LIKED

Finally, how about some music from Head Over Heels…

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