Sigil

When you're a game designer in the late nineties with an arcade shooter in your head that could run on weaker machines, out comes something like Sigil. Unknown authors dug this minimalist action game out of the archives in 2019 and released it freely — and it's exactly the kind of game that blurs in your memory with a dozen others you mixed up at the rental store.

I'm playing a top-down shooter where I control a small dot moving across the screen, aiming at other dots. Enemies move in simple patterns, dropping on me in square formations and attempting something like unit cohesion. The goal is foolproof: survive as long as you can, score goes up, difficulty slowly climbs. Nothing more, nothing less. The magic — and the stumbling block — lies precisely in that simplicity. The game knows what it wants, but it's less certain about keeping it interesting.

The mechanics are precise and no-frills. Controls work without a hitch, the music and visuals are tuned to "functional enough to play" — which on DOS or an old PC with one hand on the mouse was enough. But I'm missing something that would pull me back. No special weapons, no power-ups, no twist that says: this is where it breaks. It's you and them, you shoot, you die, restart. After fifty identical attackers, it starts coming apart at the seams.

Sigil is pure, unadorned work from someone who had a game in their head and programmed it directly without compromise or luxury. That's its honor — there's not a shred of design ego, just mechanics. Fun for a moment, but it won't keep you long. Someone else is designing this better these days.

Today I'll come back to it when I want to play something that won't tax me, just something between coffee and the walk home. It's not a game you sit down for knowing a story awaits, an arc of evolution, a surprise. It's an action squat for seven minutes — and sometimes that's exactly what you need.