Dizzy - Fantasy World

I remember that moment perfectly: a graveyard, nighttime, me as an egg in sweatpants, and a chasm I'd fall into for the tenth time in ten minutes. Fantasy World Dizzy taught me humility in 1991 the way we'd now call "brutally unfair design decisions."

Fantasy World Dizzy is a platformer adventure from Codemasters, the English company that systematically milked this series with its round hero throughout the eighties on 8-bit computers. The MS-DOS version from 1991 finally brought Dizzy to PC, along with his entire fairy-tale absurdity — magical worlds, peculiar characters, simple yet clever logic puzzles. The story is classically straightforward: evil wizard, kidnapped girlfriend Daisy, Dizzy trapped in a dungeon. The rest is up to you.

It plays as a combination of platformer and adventure with inventory — you collect items, combine them with your surroundings, unlock the way forward. Dizzy moves slowly and somewhat clunkily, jumps require precision that the controls barely allow. That's probably the biggest problem: pixel-perfect platforming with controls that respond like a soggy sponge. Lives are lost quickly, checkpoints don't exist. You get three lives for the entire game, and when you lose them, you start over. In 1991, that was called a challenge.

What the Dizzy series did brilliantly was its world. Every screen had character, the environment was consistently fairy-tale-like without being childishly bland. The puzzles made sense in their context and required thinking, not just trying every item on every object — a rare luxury in adventures back then. The PC Speaker music was naturally a disaster, but if you had Sound Blaster, it was bearable. Today the game has aged unevenly: the puzzle part holds up, the platforming part is hanging on by its teeth.

Today, Fantasy World Dizzy is played mainly by those who remember it and want to verify whether it was really that hard — it was. And then by curious types interested in how an adventure looked when it had to fit into a few kilobytes and work with twenty screens instead of twenty hours of content. You can run it in a browser without any trouble, keyboard controls feel the same as back then, and frustration is guaranteed for free.