Funny Fruits

When you pick up Funny Fruits, you don't know if you're playing a game or if the game is playing you. This computer-addled nonsense from 1994 took on a simple mandate: sweep fruit across the screen and collect it. You don't have to figure out the rest.

It's a straightforward puzzle with action elements, where various fruits appear on screen and you have to remove them using a matching system. You click, you drag, you try to remember where pieces are – if you still had time for such things back then. The game usually plays out under a time limit, with less space after each move and mounting pressure. It's a magician without tricks – simple, straightforward, sometimes painfully monotonous.

The graphics are in the most endearing nineties style: colorful, scraggly fruit sprites that look more like abstract shapes than an apple or pear. The sound, when it exists, has the quality of plastic squeaking. Controls without much fuss – you don't even have to remember what each key does. The rules sink in in seconds, and then it's just a matter of patience and time.

Funny Fruits was printed thousands of times in the nineties in various game compilations on CD. It wasn't a hit, it wasn't a revolution. It was a placeholder game when you were looking for something to play without pressure. Today someone might call it "casual gaming" if they wanted to be generous. It's aged better than you'd expect for something like this – you can't see on it that it was made by a team convinced of its genius. It's just there, quiet and inscrutable.

Playing it today will be interesting mostly as time travel. It's not a game that would shape you, it doesn't teach you anything useful. But when you fire it up in a browser, you've got an hour or two just gone. It's the kind of thing a person made in 1994 when they didn't have better entertainment. And that's not a complaint.