Toad

When you boot up Toad, it's immediately clear that something peculiar is sweeping through this old computer. It's not really a game in the classical sense, but rather an interactive experiment from the mid-nineties, when programmers were still clumsily fumbling around with graphics and sound without much effort put into the game itself.

In Toad, you navigate some sort of character — or, more precisely, you try to navigate it — through levels that look like someone drew them in Paint during their lunch break. The goal is presumably to reach the end of the map and collect things, but the game doesn't really talk about it. The menu is sparse, instructions don't exist, and it looks more like a tech demo than a finished product.

It plays in a way that might fascinate someone with a particular taste for the picturesque. The controls work, the character moves, but everything is slow, clunky, and devoid of any sense of feedback. The sounds come from an old computer complaining about something. The graphics are primitively painful — more like a school project than something anyone would want to play for fun.

Toad is primarily a period artifact: proof of an era when not everyone who had DOS and a compiler had to be a capable creator. The game has no legacy, influenced no one, and even the person who made it didn't remember it properly. Today, all that remains is its status as a curiosity in archives of old computer games.

If you have a weakness for botched experiments of the nineties or you're curious about what the first steps of amateur programmers looked like, Toad is exactly what you're looking for. Everyone else can safely go somewhere else.