Beast

A strange thing happens when playing an eighties strategy game and realize that even after thirty years you still don't know what you're actually doing. Beast is precisely such an experiment — dark, obscure, and simultaneously fascinating pointlessness that grabs you precisely because you can't figure out whether it's a brilliant concept or simply poorly documented game.

In MS-DOS you find yourself in a text environment where you somehow participate in the course of battle — there's an RPG element, strategy, but what exactly you control and how you improve it is a mystery you must solve yourself. The game gives you minimal explanation. Character, statistics, turn after turn something happens, but the boundary between what is procedural generation and what is your decision dissolves into uncertainty.

Playing takes place in the command line without graphs, without maps, without anything that would make orientation easier for you. You enter commands, wait for a response, and then you make your own movie in your head. Some turn passes quickly, another takes you an eternity, if you even understand what's happening. Beast doesn't lie — it's not a game for boring people who need buttons and pictures. At the same time, it's not a game that explains to you why you should continue.

In the context of 1984, Beast is an interesting oddity. War is happening, some beasts might appear here, there's logic that someone in the computer saw, but I wasn't able to decipher it. The game wasn't popularized, didn't have fans who would explain it — it remained a small archive oriented toward the patient and enthusiasts of the experimental.

Today you play Beast only out of archival interest. It's not a game that would surprise you with modern depth — it's purely a retro curiosity that reminds you how differently things were done back then. If you don't mind playing a game without a tutorial, without meaning, and without a guarantee that you'll ever understand it, it awaits you here. Actually — mystery awaits you.