Windwalker

I had one single chance to get back home and save my people — and those were exactly the words that greeted me in Windwalker, when the weight of this mission began to settle in.

This is an action RPG from the very beginning of the nineties, where you play as a character with magical abilities, navigating through a dark world full of trouble and obligations. The game unfolds in classic fantasy settings — no spaceships, no time-shifting technology, just plain old magic and sword. Your goal is to push through a series of dungeons and locations, collect artifacts, increase your power, and overcome enemies who don't think twice before blasting you with some spell right in the face.

You play it from a top-down perspective, exactly as it came out of the eighties — you're running across the screen, looking down at your characters in isometric or semi-3D perspective, and clicking where to go next. The controls are straightforward, but not always forgiving. If you misjudge the timing of an attack, pain follows. Magic is there to help you, but spells don't trigger instantly — you have to wait for the animation, and during intense combat that means hell. The battle systems aren't elaborately designed, more practical — attack, defend, run, cast spell, attack again.

This was a game that dared to be tough in the nineties without unnecessary sympathy. It wasn't any graphical sensation (pixelated, yet nicely colorful), but it had something to it, a certain atmosphere of a dark corner of the world. Today you look at it knowing that similar entertainment just isn't made anymore — too straightforward, too uncompromising.

If you want to return to a time when RPGs were played without pointless tutorials and hand-holding, and you're willing to spend some time overcoming genuinely difficult passages where you can warm your bones with truly old-school games, Windwalker is the right choice. It runs smoothly in the browser — it's nothing that will bring your computer to its knees, and the atmosphere stays just as tough as it always was.