Fallen Heroes

When you start the game, you meet a story that knows nobody will probably listen too closely — and that's actually its strength. Fallen Heroes from 1996 is a tactical RPG developed by creators without a big budget, and you see it in every pixel. But instead of appearing as a mistake, you feel authenticity radiating from a game that doesn't believe in dramatic cutscenes, but in bloody tactical clashes.

You command a group of characters on a checkerboard field and try to get them through a series of missions without bleeding them all dry. The game takes place in some dark fantasy setting — more concrete details dissolve in the haze of programming similar to Jagged Alliance or older S.P.A.L. The goal is simple: position, distance, enemy resistance. Room for maneuver is minimal, a mistake costs you a life, and the game won't shy away from punishing you for it.

As you play, frustrating tactics await you that aren't always transparent. Distances are calculated strangely, enemies sometimes behave stupidly, sometimes too cleverly. The graphics look like they were drawn with a marker on a paper napkin. The sound — when it exists — reminds you of a startup beep with distortion. And yet something's happening here: there's an earnestness that games later with budgets in the millions aimed purely at elegance.

Fallen Heroes are remembered more as an amulet from a time when indie games weren't a trend, but a necessity. The creators apparently didn't know how to make brilliant games, so they just made theirs. Today it looks like documentation of a certain poverty in computer graphics — and at the same time proof that really good mechanics have no color, just function.

If you want to remind yourself what the nineties were actually like — without the retro romance filter — Fallen Heroes will teach you. It's not easy. It's not beautiful. But it's there. You'll get through it in a browser in a few hours, and they'll be hours where you won't wonder about the graphics, but about the fact that you let another person die just because you miscalculated the distance.