Velcro Mind

Nobody dares to make things like this anymore. A simple, almost absurd idea — colorful pieces on screen that need to match — and nothing else. No story, no reason. Just a game. Velcro Mind from 1995 is exactly the kind of thing you play five times and then forget it ever existed.

It's a so-called memory game that anyone can understand. Colored or patterned tiles appear on screen, they hide, and your job is to find them in pairs. Not much memorization involved, more of a reflex thing — sound and sequence. The PC version runs on DOS without a hitch, the image is clear, the controls straightforward. Just a little time-killer.

What makes playing interesting is the pace, not strategy. The difficulty lies in the number of tiles and how fast they disappear from the screen. You're racing against the clock, remembering patterns, clicking as fast as you can. There's no room for thinking; either you oriented yourself or you didn't. The mechanics are dumb in the best sense of the word — no false distractions.

Today's view of such games is burdened by the remnants of nineties educational software. It looks like something that should be called "Train Your Memory for Success in Life" and smile at you pleasantly. The reality is that Velcro Mind is just a time-waster without much thought. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's hardly worth more than one gaming season.

These days it makes sense to play it more as a curiosity — the feel of DOS graphics, a corner of a fifty-year-old computer, straightforwardness that nobody does anymore. You can fire it up in an emulator online in a few seconds, play it for twelve minutes, and peacefully return to something that at least pretends to have content.