Math Rescue

When I first looked at Math Rescue, I expected a typical edutainment game packed with boring exercises and sounds you can't turn off. Instead, I found myself solving math problems to keep a monster on screen from shoving my head in the refrigerator. That's a significant difference.

It's a point-and-click adventure with an educational bent that takes you through a family home full of curious characters and strange situations. Rather than just throwing math problems at you, the math tasks are woven into solving actual problems. Want to get a door key? Solve an example. Need to get rid of the monster under the bed? You've got to catch the right answer. The logic isn't exactly sophisticated, but it sets itself apart from classic edutainment titles in that playing it isn't a painless exercise routine.

The controls are straightforward — you click on things, read text, solve problems. The graphics are primitive, the animation choppy, but it's got that right retro charm — in its own way, it's appealing. The sounds are jittery and sharp-edged. It won't be a groundbreaking experience, but it works functionally. Progress isn't linear, which means you'll sometimes wonder what's actually happening here, but that's exactly the mystery that makes the adventure interesting.

Math Rescue represents an era when computer owners tried to educate their kids by strapping them to a monitor with something that looked like fun. It's not a bad idea, except the result had its limitations. The game looks dated and plays with a certain roughness, but it's got the virtue of at least trying to do it originally.

These days you'll play it mostly out of nostalgia or curiosity about how they did things back then. But whoever wants to remember when educational software wasn't absolute boredom, or wants to see how ambitiously programmers in the early '90s thought about education and playability, can find it easily in an emulator. It's not a lost gem, but it's worth a try.