Young Stuff

The game is called Young Stuff and nobody really knows who made it. That should tell you something right off the bat.

It's a story-driven adventure from 1993 for DOS, where you move around in a text-based audio environment and the game tries to tell you some kind of story. But everything about it is vague and hazy, like some rambling drunk guy at a bar is narrating your life. The game pretends to be a point-and-click adventure, but really you're just flailing around clicking on things with no sense of rhythm or logic. Don't bother trying to figure out the objectives — you won't even know if you've completed them or if the screen just vanished for some reason.

Playing this is frustration in its purest form. The controls are all over the place, the puzzle logic is incomprehensible at best. The game won't tell you what to do. Not once. While a proper adventure game guides you with breadcrumbs, Young Stuff just leaves you thrashing around in the dark hoping for the best. Sometimes you get the feeling the game itself doesn't know what it wants from you. Graphics? Bland. Sound? Weak. Dialogue? If it even exists.

From today's perspective, it's more of a curiosity than an actual game. The nineties had hundreds of similar amateur attempts at conventions — unpolished, immature, forgotten. Young Stuff is exactly one of those titles that nobody ever asked for, that probably didn't even reach a thousand copies in circulation. Its only contribution is historical: proof that not every ambition results in a game anyone else would actually want to play.

You might stumble across it nowadays in some oddities collection on oldgame.cz. Actually — why would you? Only if you're curious what a DOS game looks like with zero polish, elegance, or any functional design sense whatsoever. It's like staring into an archive box full of old papers. Interesting for a moment, then just depressing.