Kosilka / Косилка

Kosilka — just a lawnmower rolling through the countryside, mowing down everything in its path. Nothing complicated, no stories, no philharmonic orchestras. Just that.

It's a simple action game from 1996, probably made by hobbyists since no manufacturer is listed. You sit behind the wheel of a stylized lawnmower or grass-cutting machine and drive across a map full of obstacles you have to avoid or mow down. The goal is straightforward — get through the level, collect stuff, reach the destination. The game plays like a proto-tetris action version, where instead of falling blocks, space limitations and time pressure fall upon you.

The graphics are what you'd expect from the early '90s on MS-DOS — simple squares and rectangles in a limited color palette, which today looks more like a pixel exercise than an actual game. The controls work without frills — directions and acceleration, nothing fancy. The game plays without thrills, without any attempt at drama. You mow, you crouch under obstacles, you try to find a path to the other side. It's monotonous in both the good and bad sense of the word — hypnotic, almost boring, yet so simple you can jump in without any preparation.

Kosilka belongs to those games that never should have been made — they're not fun enough to remember, but also not foolproof enough to work as a relaxing break. It survived only as a curiosity you find in archives of old DOS games among hundreds of other forgotten attempts.

Today it's worth playing only out of nostalgia or curiosity — you want to see what the most boring idea of fun looked like in 1996. You can run it in a browser through an emulator, spend twenty minutes on a map that bores you, and then realize why the publishing industry was brutal — not everything that gets coded deserves a publisher's stamp.