Microsurgeon

Microsurgeon from Imagic is one of the strangest games of the early eighties: you play a miniature robot probe released inside a human body. The patient lies still, the screen shows a schematic of his system — vessels, intestines, lungs, brain — and you swim through it looking for what is diseased and treating it. The game first appeared on Intellivision in 1982; what you play here is the PC version from 1984.

The heart of it is choosing what to fire. You carry three treatments — ultrasound, antibiotics and aspirin — and each works on something different. Ultrasound does nothing for a bacterial infection, antibiotics do nothing for a tumour, and a blocked vessel calls for something else again. Supplies are limited and so is the probe's power, so the question is never whether you can find the problems but whether you can reach them before your energy runs out. The goal is to raise the patient's overall condition to “good” and then leave the body through an eye, an ear, the nose or the mouth.

The pace is slow and deliberate, closer to strategy than to action. Most of your time goes on reading the map, moving between organs and deciding what is most urgent; when obstacles slow you down or another organ deteriorates, the plan has to change. It is genuinely tense precisely because the patient keeps getting worse while you are somewhere else.

Today its main interest is as proof that a game could be instructive and clever without being labelled educational. The anatomy is heavily simplified and steering the probe is stiff, but the idea holds up and a session lasts about as long as it should. It is no accident that the game later turned up in a museum exhibition about game design.

On oldgame.cz it runs directly in the browser, with no installation needed.