Reon's Adventure

When a simple graph and title screen without grand ambitions appear in DOSBox, you know you're in for something from an older lineage. Reon's Adventure is a typical representative of little-known platformers from the nineties, when every other amateur thought they already knew how to make Mario.

It's a 2D platformer where you control a character named Reon through various levels. The goal is straightforward: get from point A to point B, collect what you can, avoid trouble. No surprises, no plot twists — just collecting things and jumping. The settings are all over the place, from forests to temples, all in that retro quality that's exactly what you'd expect.

The controls work at a basic level, but right here the game reveals the gap between ambition and execution. Jumping, movement, collecting items — that works. But the jumping precision isn't ideal and sometimes you feel doomed to failure more because of the game than your own mistakes. The graphics are colorful, the music modest in this approach, but that's no surprise for a DOS game from 1994.

Reon's Adventure largely hides itself in oblivion because it simply didn't bring anything new or particularly interesting to an overflowing genre. It exists only because someone wanted to make a platformer, and it fulfilled its purpose — nothing more. It's not bad, it's just unremarkably average.

Play it today? Only if you're collecting everything that can run in DOSBox and have tolerance for platformers that drag on without sparks. It's not a lost treasure, but not something that should've vanished either. It's simply a game that existed, had its time, and then remained for a few enthusiasts who might remember it now and then in lists of everything that ever was.