Adventures of Tom Sawyer (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of Seta's 1989 action game for the NES, Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

1989 marked the unlikely release of two Famicom games to be loosely based on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain's classic 1876 American novel. The first, Seta's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer," made its way stateside later that same year, while "Square's Tom Sawyer," an RPG primarily known for its insensitive depiction of black people, never left Japan.

Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the NES is a decidedly liberal reinterpretation of Twain's coming-of-age tale set in the antebellum south. There are no fences to be whitewashed, murderers to be captured, or bodies to be found.

Instead, the game begins with Tom falling asleep at school, and each of his six adventures takes place in his dreams. He explores a pirate ship, rafts down the Mississippi, fights a giant gorilla and a witch, and flies through the clouds battling an armored zepplin before finally arriving at the cave where his crush, Becky, is being held captive by the dinosaur-riding Injun Joe.

It's an unexpectedly lighthearted and delightfully absurd take on the novel's themes and characters, which is probably for the best given that the game was clearly aimed at young kids, and the gameplay follows suit. The controls are simple, the level layouts are straightforward, the enemies pose little threat, and a few vehicle-based segments have been tossed into the mix for the sake of variety.

The plain graphics and stiff controls come across as primitive for a 1989 release - it looks and feels quite similar to the Puss 'n Boots game, originally released in 1986 - but it's entertaining enough to keep a young child occupied for a weekend, though most adults could probably blow through it in an hour or two.

I used to be pretty hard on it, but Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a neat little game that has been all but forgotten in the decades following its release, and it's one that might be worth a look if you're looking for an easy-going 8-bit platformer.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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