Samotnik

I picked up that joystick and knew it was going to be rough. Samotník from 1991 is the kind of game you find in some DIY collection of games on floppy disks without a case or manual — which honestly isn't a bad thing in this case, because the manual wouldn't have taught you anything anyway.

It's a straightforward top-down shooter where you control something like a little tank or armored vehicle across grid-based maps. Your objective is clear: shoot as many enemies as you can before they take you down. The graphics are primitive considering when it was made — single-color targets, static backgrounds, nothing that catches your eye. But that's actually the authentic look of games from an era when a programmer sat down at a computer and decided: today I'm making a shooter.

The controls work pretty much how you'd expect: arrow keys to move, some button to shoot. It's not fluid, it's not elegant, but it works. You shoot, you die, you try again. That's the eternal loop — no story, no levels with progression, nothing that gives you a sense of direction. You just shoot until your health runs out.

Games like this are in the archives mainly to show how it all started. There's no attempt at innovation or deep entertainment here — just bare-bones mechanics. The sounds are gritty, animation is absent, and fun factor is questionable too. Samotník is honest in its name: it's truly a solitary pastime with no flair, no social features, nothing but shooting.

Nowadays you play it more out of curiosity than a desire for fun. In a browser emulator, you'll remember it as something that existed just to exist — with no grand ambitions and no grand results. For someone wanting to see the pure origins of PC gaming, this is exactly what you're looking for. For everyone else, it's more of a historical curiosity.