Mäntyliemi

Mäntyliemi is a small adventure game for DOS from 1994 and a typical product of the Finnish home-computer and BBS scene of the 1990s — a world of hobbyist titles that international retro sites rarely document. It was distributed in an archive called sim-peli.zip, complete with a period instruction file, OHJE.TXT.

The hero is Mara, who arrives at his cottage, called Mäntyliemi, worn out after a hard day's work. His task is disarmingly mundane: find his wife Eeva and finally get some sleep. This everyday premise, told entirely in Finnish, gives the game its peculiar charm.

It is a curiosity rather than a grand adventure, but exactly the kind of title that shows what was being made outside the commercial industry. You can play Mäntyliemi right in your browser on OldGame.cz.