Ninja Tuck II: Booka

There are games where you pick up the joystick and you already know it's going to be weird. Ninja Tuck II: Booka is exactly that kind of game.

It's something between a platformer and an action adventure set in some oriental environment with a library in the title. The main character is a figure named Booka — and when you see the sprites with a bit of design imagination, you realize you're in the nineties dealing with something indie and strange. The goal is stereotypical: you progress through the level, jump on platforms, dodge enemies, collect items. Nothing particularly revolutionary, more like a standard from the second half of the '90s.

Playing it is... let's say speculative. The jumping physics feel like an ice rink, the control responsiveness isn't exactly on point, enemies behave unpredictably. It's not maliciously bad, more like a game that one guy made in his garage and nobody afterward pushed it through playtesting. The graphics are fine for DOS in the eighties — pixels, animations without major ambitions, but believable. The sound is minimal, as you'd expect for the era.

Ninja Tuck II is played today through nostalgia and curiosity. It's not a game you'd play for the gaming experience — you play it because you wonder why it even exists and why it's called exactly this. That's partially its charm. It aged in the sense that the level design isn't particularly refined and the difficulty jumps without logic.

If you're a fan of obscure DOS games and appreciate retro stuff without fancy graphics, try it in your browser. It'll take you half an hour, during which you'll realize this game was someone's dream, and then it vanishes into the dustbin of history. It's not bad — it's just forgotten.