Rasterscan

Rasterscan came out on Mastertronic, the label famous for games costing a couple of pounds, and the DOS version hosted here is dated 1988. For a budget title it is a surprisingly ambitious thing: a science fiction puzzler about a wreck, a broken droid and a clock that keeps running down.

You control MSB — a spherical maintenance droid that is itself half broken — aboard the ship Rasterscan drifting helplessly through space. First you must repair yourself, then bring the generator and the engines back to life, and finally get the ship under control. The vessel is a maze of screens in zero gravity: the droid moves with real inertia, every nudge sends it floating until it hits something, and learning to brake against the walls is a skill in its own right. Doors bar your way, and each opens only after you solve a logic puzzle — a different kind every time, so even the thinking never repeats itself.

The first half hour is confusion: the game explains almost nothing, the battery keeps draining, and you drift through corridors piecing together what is actually wanted of you. Reviewers of the day held exactly that against it, and they were right; so were the ones who praised its originality and atmosphere. Both are true at once — and once you see through the system, there is honestly not much game left and the ending comes fairly quickly.

Which is exactly why it plays well today: a strange, dense experience for an evening or two, and a relic of the era when even budget games tried their own ideas instead of copying the hits. If you enjoy bafflement that slowly turns into understanding, this is precisely your cup.

You can revive MSB on oldgame.cz right in your browser, nothing to install.