Bible Adventures

When I think about games from the nineties that simply had no business being on the market, Bible Adventures is exactly the kind of experiment where someone said: "Hey, let's take stories from the Old Testament and turn them into a platformer." The result? A strange mix of educational attempts and standard jumping action that confuses you more than it entertains you.

It's basically a series of four short games bundled into one package, each based on biblical episodes. You play as a jumper, run across the screen, collect things, jump over obstacles, and try to reach the goal. Technically speaking, nothing special. But what catches your attention is precisely the bizarreness of the whole idea — the Bible as inspiration for a DOS platformer that nobody remembers, has no reviews, and whose creators prefer to stay anonymously credited.

The controls are basic, the graphics humble, the music more noise than melody. The game doesn't teach you biblical stories; instead it puts you in a situation where you ask yourself what you're actually playing. The levels are short, the behavior unpleasantly unpredictable at times. It's not a bad game in the sense that you couldn't play it, but it's a game nobody intends to play twice.

Today it appeals mainly to those who want to have a laugh at the curiosities of the eighties and nineties, or historians of weird educational experiments. By itself it discovers nothing, pushes the genre nowhere, and doesn't even know what it wants to be. It simply exists as an anecdote in PC gaming history.