Kosmonaut

A cosmonaut blasting off from Earth and landing on the Moon — sounds like a sci-fi story, but in reality it was your mission in 1990 on an IBM computer. Kosmonaut is a weird cross between a platformer and a racing game that you wouldn't classify correctly at first glance.

You play as a cosmonaut who must navigate through diverse levels made up of terrain, platforms, and obstacles. But here there's no running or jumping like in classic platformers — your mode of locomotion is a makeshift spacecraft or a wheeled vehicle, and the game tries to combine elements of obstacle avoidance with item collection and time pressure. It goes hand in hand with the dynamics you'd expect from a racing game, just without a finish line.

The controls are primitive, but adequate for the era. Arrow keys move the vehicle left and right, and somewhere there's a jump button or acceleration key. The pixel-art graphics have that sleepy 8-bit charm — odd little characters, monophonic music droning in the background that'll stick in your ears long enough to drive you crazy. The gameplay itself is slow, compulsive, and feels like you're playing something that should have come out five years earlier.

Kosmonaut isn't a game you'd remember as a pinnacle of game design. Rather, it's a modest experiment that tried something new and fell slightly short. Still, it was part of a trainable archive of games that enjoyed hidden favor among amateur programmers in Czechia and Central Europe — places where computers arrived slowly and any game was welcome.

Today, Kosmonaut is mainly an artifact, a treasure trove for retro enthusiasts who want to see what experimental attempts looked like in converting platformer gameplay into something between a vehicle and a character. If you love old computer games and aren't put off by slow pacing and sounds like they're from a musical with industrial harmony, you've got something to try. Everyone else can just read about it and move on.