Dick Tracy

Here we have a classic from the era when action games still expected the player to think. Dick Tracy from 1990 is no graphical treat — it's primitive, straightforward, and oddly addictive stuff that hooks you with its directness.

It's a detective action game based on the comic book character. You play as a detective in an iconic fedora and have to deal with gangsters, investigations, and gunplay. The game takes place in a stylized city full of suspicious characters and murky atmosphere — exactly how this detective's world should look. The goal is clear: unravel the crime network, face the gangs head-on, and survive.

The controls are spartan, and that has its charm. You move across the screen, shoot, and collect ammo. The game doesn't hold your hand — at least not always. Sometimes the level logic feels pretty random, sometimes you find a clean path through, sometimes you die without warning. The graphics are what computers of that era could produce — colors without frills, characters like silhouettes, animation sparse. Sounds? The sounds are there, doing their job, sounding exactly like pixelated bullets and thuds should. Nothing dazzling, but functional.

Why do we still remember it? Because it was different. It wasn't a game that carried you on the wings of dramatic setpieces — it was a game about the pleasure of tinkering with something without grand ambitions. There were more like it in the nineties, but Dick Tracy had that hard gangster America atmosphere that games usually feared to touch.

Today it's primarily an artifact. The graphics have aged, the mechanics are simple, the difficulty is frustrating in places. But even so, that undying freedom sometimes grabs you — you can fire it up in your browser and spend a while in that eerie pixelated city where a fedora-wearing detective shoots in all directions. It's not a great game, but it's an honest game, and that's sometimes more than enough.