Spider Run

Spider Run is a small 1995 DOS shareware puzzler that openly descends from Pipe Dream. You get a grid eight cells across and six deep, filled with pieces of web, and a spider that keeps crawling along whatever path you manage to build in front of it.

The twist is that you do not place tiles, you rotate them. Every cell already holds a piece of web, either a straight run, a bend or a crossroads, and your job is to turn them so they connect. The spider never waits, so you are always working just ahead of it. Everything is done with the mouse, which means the whole game comes down to how many clicks you can make before the path runs out.

It sounds trivial and the first few levels are. What shows up quickly is how easily you get caught planning only one step ahead: a badly rotated crossroads sends the spider into a corner of the grid, and from there the run is usually finished. A fly occasionally lands on the web, and it is the one reason to take a longer route rather than the shortest one. The full release has thirty levels, the shareware taste has seven, and each opens with a piece of spider trivia.

This is a ten-minute game with no spectacle and no depth to speak of. The rotation mechanic works, though, and in this format it still plays pleasantly, mostly because a round is short and you can see immediately which turn ruined it. Anyone who liked Pipe Dream will know within a minute whether they want the other levels.

On oldgame.cz it runs in the browser directly, with nothing to install.