Zapper 4: Escape from Neverwhere

You're falling down a hole and you already know it's going to be a long one. Zapper 4: Escape from Neverwhere from 1992 is a platformer that messes with your head — in both good and bad ways. You're some guy your ex-girlfriend wants to kill, and a unicorn pretends it wants to help you using various left-wing ideas. Sounds weird? It is weird.

The game world is painted in warm colors and pixels that somewhat remind you of Mad magazine. You traverse levels full of pitfalls, enemies, and things that just hang on screen without any logic. Your goal is to get out of each level alive. Simple, right? You've got a jump, you've got some attack (which you'll probably barely remember), and you've got the ability to throw things. That's all.

The controls respond slower than you'd expect. Jumping and moving between platforms works, but when things get tough, you feel like the game doesn't give you enough time to react. You see an enemy falling, you want to jump, but you're already falling too. The difficulty is right on the edge — hard, but not for reasons that feel fair. Between levels, a strange humor creeps in, the kind that happens when the developers think they're funnier than they actually are.

Zapper 4 is a product of its time — the tenth platformer clone trying to be different, only to end up just odd. The graphics have their charm, the music will stick in your head (more from boredom than brilliance), but after three levels you feel like you've seen it all. The game can't decide if it wants to be hard, funny, or scary, and in the end it's none of those things.

Today you'll play it in DOSBox when retro aesthetics grab you and you're in the mood for something embarrassing. It's not a lost gem — more like a forgotten thing in the archives that has its own pretty strange charm.