Skunny - Save Our Pizzas!

When a pizzeria turns into a battlefield, you know the game has ambitions. Skunny — Save Our Pizzas! is a platformer from 1993 that almost nobody remembers nowadays, even though someone with imagination released it on DOS: you're a skunk who must rescue pizzas and shoot at an unusual mix of enemies along the way. It's not a legal port of a famous series—it's an original work with its own quirky take on things.

In terms of simple gameplay, Skunny doesn't differ from thousands of other scrolling action games from that era. Left and right arrows, jump, shoot—that's all there is. You progress through levels, collect bonuses, shoot at enemies, and jump over obstacles. The backgrounds change color, enemies are stylized and often funny in their design ideas. The game isn't hard, more just monotonous—if you've seen one level, you've seen them all.

Where Skunny slightly rose above the average is in how it carries itself with energetic music and details. Sometimes you're in a pizzeria, sometimes somewhere outside. The SoundBlaster soundtrack isn't anything impressive, but it does what it does—nothing more, nothing less. The game plays without pain, without frustration, but without excitement either.

Skunny is exactly the kind of game that the nineties offered up as a sandbox with no ambitions. Nothing bad will happen to you, but you won't miss anything you haven't seen in another game from the same era. You'd play it, get through it between lunch and tea, and forget about it by evening.

Today? If you feel like exercising your reflexes without breaking a sweat, or you want to go through all the forgotten oddities from the early nineties, Skunny exists in a browser and won't cost you more than ten minutes. It's not evil—it's just a game, really.