PC Bert

Bert. You know those retro games where you have to look for a while before you realize what's actually happening? This is exactly one of those. It's a simple point and click adventure released by someone without much equipment into the world in 1997, and it just quietly hangs there in the digital archive like a forgotten note.

In PC Bert you move around black or dark backgrounds with minimalist design, collect items and solve logical puzzles. The game isn't pretentious in any way — it doesn't have big graphics, it doesn't have a famous name, it doesn't have worldwide hype. It's more like a local creation from a time when absolutely anyone could throw a DIY adventure onto floppy disks and the world wouldn't even hear about it.

Playing revolves around clicking. Left click for movement, right click for interacting with objects, collecting things into your inventory. On paper it's the same recipe as thousands of games — just cheaper and less polished. The puzzles aren't particularly thought-through, more like logical necessities that push you to the next screen. To a forty-year-old who experienced Monkey Island, it feels like walking on asphalt after trudging through flowers.

Why do we remember it at all? Probably we remember the idea of it more than it itself. PC Bert is proof of an era when the barrier to entry for releasing games was just above zero. Today it would end up on Itch.io with five downloads, back then it was still physically distributed. That makes it interesting as a cross-section of history, not as entertainment.

Playing it today is more of an archival act than a gaming experience. It runs in DOSBox without issues — count on about a quarter hour of clicking before you understand what it wants from you, and then you're just waiting for it to end. It's not bad, it's just not particularly important for anything. Sometimes it's worth going back to these pieces to see what all the content was built from, which later knew how to do things well.