How Things Work in Busytown

When I first got this game in my hands, it practically unpacked everything you'd imagine under the word "educational." A clickable visit to a quirky little town full of gears, levers, and water pumps — that was How Things Work in Busytown on a 1994 computer. I was surprised how little I knew about it, despite its existence.

It's an interactive guide drawing inspiration from Richard Scarry's famous illustrated world. With brushes, automobiles, and other machines, everything here spins, whirs, and responds to clicks. The game doesn't care about story or meter — visitors find nothing but little physics tricks hidden in various corners of the screen. You open a door, push a lever, and see what happens.

The mechanics are simple: click, look, and listen. The mouse cursor shows you where you can interact. Once you click, the game triggers something — sometimes animations last seconds, sometimes longer. The sounds are recorded brilliantly; a horse neighs, gears creak, steam hisses. However, after you've gone through a hundred of these moments in a row, it starts repeating. The educational element is undeniably here, but after a while you're playing it more out of obligation than pleasure.

The animated aesthetic of the nineteen-fifties is captured faithfully and without apology. Every corner of the screen is full of details, so even a blind person can figure out what's possible to activate there. The colors play on nostalgia for those who know Scarry's books, and to young viewers it must have seemed like magic. From today's perspective, though, the work seems slow, sequential, and without ambitions for anything more than passive exploration.

Today you'll play it in an emulator more as an archival curiosity or when you want to see what educational games for small children actually looked like in the nineties. It's not poorly done, just very tentative. It doesn't inspire experimentation, just look at something and wait for the next click. If you're interested in old DOS nostalgia and gentle education without pressure, it's worth trying — though just for an hour or two.