Dark Ages

When you boot up Dark Ages, you hear exactly what you'd expect from a 1991 game — a shrill synth looped into infinity and a character bouncing like they're on springs. The medieval theme is in the title, a character in a cone-shaped hat jumps between stone platforms trying not to die. That's all there is. No story, no plot, just more and more lions.

It's a classic 2D platformer with zero ambitions for originality. Lions alternate, sometimes falling block-like things appear that you need to avoid, or boxes with items. The map is linear — you progress forward and upward, if you manage it. Controls are simple: movement and jump. Nothing extra, nothing complex, nothing that suggests the creators had any greater vision.

The jumping mechanic is classically unpleasant. The character has inertia that kicks in way too late, and the pixels you're supposed to land on are poorly defined. You fall when you think you've made it onto the platform — this imprecision isn't a worthy challenge, it's just frustrating. The graphics are fine in the sense that it's 1991 DOS, but individual levels look like carbon copies of each other.

Dark Ages isn't a bad game in the sense that it's unplayable or technically broken. It's that kind of mediocre game you'd watch someone else play back then (and honestly, still today) more out of determination to reach the end than any genuine fun. It was filler for a collection, something to pass the time. It came with no legend, no cult status, no interesting mechanical trick that would set it apart from thousands of others.

Today it makes sense to play it at best for archival reasons — to know how platformers were made in the early nineties with no marketing budget and no drive to be better. It's depressingly bland in the most hopeless sense of the word, and yet you can't say it doesn't work. There's just no reason why you should bother with it today.