Gnome Ranger II - Ingrid's Back

Gnome Ranger II is a majestic proof that everything old doesn't have to be good. The sequel to the first game arrives with the same idea — throwing the player into a world full of mysteries and objects — but with the difference that now everything is a bit dumber and at the same time frustrating.

You play as Ingrid, a gnome explorer who wanders through an abstract world trying to solve various logic puzzles. The intention is clever: the game forces you to think, combine items, talk to strange characters. But in practice it often descends into pointless clicking, bizarre logic, and dialogues where it's completely unclear what the game wants. You cross a certain line and suddenly you're somewhere else. You pick up an item and later find out you should have dropped it earlier. Solving riddles without a guide means spending long evenings in tedious trial and error.

The graphics are primitive — simple pixelart that looks like sketches on paper on the screen. There's barely any music, you mainly hear guttural sounds during actions. The controls are sluggish — pointer-based games on DOS were never ideal, and here you get the full experience. You wait for the game to react, you wait for the scene to load, you wait for that moment when you finally understand what it wants from you.

Gnome Ranger II tries to be original at a time when pointers and mice on computers were a rarity. That's respectable. The problem is that ambitions exceeded abilities — and the result is more a historical curiosity than entertainment.

Today you play it mainly as a retrospective of how creators tried to make DOS do things it wasn't built for. It's not a bad game out of necessity. It's just boring and surprisingly difficult to play.