Creepers

1993, I'm ten years old, and a caterpillar is crawling across a branch on my monitor. It's not a bug. It's the whole point of the game.

Creepers by Destiny Software Productions is a logic puzzle game where you care for little caterpillars — climbers — and your task is to safely guide each one through metamorphosis into a butterfly. Nothing more, nothing less. The setting is charmingly adorable, the goal simple, but the path there requires thinking.

Gameplay revolves around building obstacles and tools in the right places before the climber sets off on its journey. Then you just watch. The caterpillar moves on its own, responds to what you've prepared, and either reaches pupation or it doesn't. It's a direct cousin of the genre that The Incredible Machine made famous back then — games built on physical chains of cause and effect. But Creepers leans toward more relaxation and less complexity. The Professor who offers advice when you get stuck is a nice tool for younger players, not a crutch for adults.

What still works today is that basic loop: set up, run, watch. Small satisfaction when it works first try. Bigger satisfaction when you try it a third time and finally figure out where you went wrong. The graphics are acceptable for 1993 — colorful, clean, without unnecessary noise. The Sound Blaster music probably won't scare anyone out of their chair or glue them to it either. Where the game has aged, though, is the pace. If you're expecting snappy response and the ability to speed things up, you'll be sitting and watching a pixel caterpillar move at a snail's pace longer than you'd like.

Today Creepers fits mainly those who want to introduce logic games to a child without scaring them off with complexity right away. Or those of us who like to remind ourselves what PC gaming looked like from an era when a "children's game" still meant an actual puzzle, not just button mashing. In your browser it's a comfortable half-hour outing — no installation, no drivers, just you, the caterpillar, and patience.