A.G.E.

Those seventy seconds on the loading screen, while the game reads from its floppy disk, will take you through every possible emotional state. First anticipation, then boredom, then resignation. A.G.E. from 1991 tells you right then what's coming — you're going to have to work for this adventure.

It's a classic action adventure with an isometric perspective (isometry was all the rage back then), where your task is to not get killed and find something, destroy something. The environments are dark tunnels and dead laboratories. There's no joy of discovery here — everything has the color of gray concrete. Story? Words on the screen. Not a trace of emotion.

It plays like a slow battle with physics. Your character moves with nauseating inertia, as if it weighs a ton. You shoot, but the bullets fly with no confidence in themselves. Enemies flicker and disappear. There's no satisfaction in it, no payoff that would help you. Sounds are there, but as if the game itself was ashamed of them — quiet, without personality. One mistake and you fall into a pit that sends you back to the start of the level. The further you go, the more you feel the game is bored along with you.

A.G.E. was born in a time when every studio thought isometric perspectives would save the world. They didn't. Here it works against the game — clunky camera, unclear depth, fighting your own perception. The graphics got in the way of gameplay like an unwanted guest. Because of that, we remember it more as torture than fun.

Today? Only if you want to see what happened when a developer thought: "Let's make something nobody wants." It's not entertainment, it's penance. But that's exactly why you'll remember it.