Scavengers of the Mutant World

When you try to run Scavengers of the Mutant World on your computer, you're in for a raw experience that probably wouldn't crack anyone's top lists today. It's a text-graphic adventure from 1988, unleashed upon the world by some minor outfit for PC and DOS. The title promises mutants and post-apocalypse, reality is far more modestly ambitious.

You play as an explorer in a degraded building teeming with mutant creatures and treasures to collect. The game is played from a top-down perspective, you move through grid squares across a procedurally generated map and gather items along the way. The goal is straightforward: descend through floors, avoid or defeat enemies with, alas, weak AI, grab as many gems as you can. In the background, crows and synthesizers play unsettling sounds, so at least the atmosphere isn't a complete mockery of the post-apocalypse.

The controls are archaic — arrow keys for movement, actions mapped to unclear keyboard combinations. The graphics, viewed through the lens of time, weren't exactly an eyesore, but given the era it was acceptable—just a somewhat banal blocky representation of spaces. You have to keep track of your health mentally, because animations and feedback are minimal. Playing it is more of an endurance test than a pleasure — sometimes it surprises you with easy health pickups, like when a room suddenly fills with everything you need.

The game was something of an experiment in playing the unknown, where the creators seemingly couldn't decide if they wanted a roguelike, an adventure, or a puzzle game. The result is a mess that has the charm of a shapeless journal entry from the day budget-strapped creators decided to define their own game.

Today you'll play it in a browser mostly out of curiosity — to reassure yourself that your predecessors really did have fun with something like this. It's not a disaster, but it's not entertainment either. It's a thing you should have played sometime in the nineties on a bulky monitor while giving it ten percent of your attention.