Bang

Shoot yourself in the head and wait. Bang is a game that doesn't think it's clever, and that's precisely what makes it far cleverer than it should be. A 1994 MS-DOS adventure that takes you on a strange journey without fanfare and without any instructions on how to actually play the thing.

You move through rooms, collect items, combine them, talk to characters, and try to figure out what's actually going on this evening. The graphics are classic point-and-click, black and white and sparse—you control it with the mouse. Compared to the much bigger competitors of the era—LucasArts, Sierra—Bang is decently humble. There aren't stacks of dialogue trees, it's not a dialogue bubble shooter. It's an honest puzzle-adventure without a button telling you where to go next.

That's exactly where the problem and the charm intersect. At first, you can't fathom why you should do anything. You grab random items from a drawer, try using them elsewhere, and when it works, you get that moment of clarity. That's how it worked in the nineties—you played, you experimented, you poked around. The game's logic isn't always obvious and it's not forgiving. Sometimes the designers just figured it out themselves and you simply won't get there without a guide.

Bang has aged exactly like a low-budget chamber game ages. The graphics aren't ugly, but they're lazy—like someone drew them without enthusiasm. Sound is almost entirely absent. And that absence isn't retro charm; it's just a quiet room without music, without sound effects, without the little hooks that keep you in the moment.

Looking at it today, Bang isn't a game you'd play for fun. It's an artifact you load up in the browser to feel what amateur PC game creation looked like when not every indie project was backed by Kickstarter and a tweet. It's interesting for historians, for people who want to experience what it was like when game creators didn't believe in themselves and made games a bit for their own sake.