Firefall

Firefall is a tiny freeware title from 1992 and a fascinating document of its era: it was built in Game-Maker from Recreational Software Designs, one of the first tools that let ordinary players assemble a game without programming. This is exactly the kind of thing it produced — a one-person hobby project passed around for free on bulletin board systems.

The game itself is a top-down dungeon crawl in the Gauntlet mould. A nameless warrior enters the dungeon of Firefall, ignoring the carved warning that doom awaits all who enter, and from there the loop is simple: walk dark corridors, hack monsters, collect coloured keys for the matching doors and find the exit, marked by a flashing skull.

What little depth there is hides in the weapons. Potions upgrade your basic sword to a wider, chunkier axe and eventually to a fireball that flies fast and passes straight through walls, which changes how you approach crowded rooms. Visually the game is a genuine surprise — the Deluxe Paint style artwork gives the monsters and tiles real charm, even if the hero animates in just two frames and the whole thing feels held together with tape and goodwill.

Be honest with your expectations: there are only two levels and you will be done in fifteen minutes. Firefall was never meant to compete with commercial games. Its value lies in showing what grassroots computer creativity looked like in the early nineties, before there were engines and tutorials for everything. Treat it as a museum piece, not a challenge, and it does its job well.

Firefall runs on oldgame.cz straight in the browser, no installation needed.