Little Willy

When you were bored in class back in the nineties and the only entertainment were minigames in the computer lab, something like Little Willy was exactly what you needed. A simple logic platformer that tries to combine puzzles with platform jumping — and surprisingly, it actually works pretty well.

It's an MS-DOS game where you control a little boy navigating through various levels full of obstacles, traps, and logic puzzles. The goal is straightforward: reach the end of the level. But the path there isn't just about jumping across platforms. You have to find the right route, move objects around, sometimes unlock doors in the correct sequence of actions. The game forces you to think, even though the graphics look like something someone would have coded in Turbo Pascal over a weekend.

The mechanics are basic. Movement, jumping, collecting things. The controls are simple to the point of being primitive — there's no finesse here. You try, you fall, you try again. That's actually a strength — the game doesn't punish you with long waits between retries. The levels aren't long, but it takes you a while to figure out the order you need to do things. It's never spectacular, but it feels cohesive — like someone had one decent idea and stuck with it.

Nobody's going to play Little Willy today as their favorite game of the year. It's aged the same way all games from that era have — the graphics are flat, the music is catchy but monotonous, no wow moments. But there's nothing in it that actively hurts either. Simply put, it's missing what players learned to look for — dynamism, effect, something more than an engineering approach to fun.

Today? More like a curiosity. When you've got a spare fifteen minutes and want to experience what people played in the 286 era, when developers thought logic platformers would be a hit. It's not bad, it's not good either — it's simply been forgotten.