Bedlam 2 - Absolute Bedlam

When it starts flashing and blaring at full volume, you know something's happening. Bedlam 2 isn't a game about subtlety — it's a massacre in black and white graphics where everything under the sun rains down on you nonstop and you've got a second to dodge it or shoot it.

It's a straightforward arcade shoot-em-up from 1997 where you're trying to survive an ever-growing cyclone of mad creatures and projectiles. Your character moves across the play area and you can rotate and control its movement to avoid it all. Shooting happens automatically, so you're only focused on navigating through the chaotic swarm of enemies and their fire. Nothing complicated, just pure reflexes.

The graphics in fifty shades of grey are minimalist to the point of excess, but that's where its power lies — you don't need to distinguish what's what, your attention stays locked on one thing. The sound is sharp and scratchy, that authentic DOS beep without any sentiment. The game doesn't ramp up difficulty gradually, it more like throws exponential chaos in your face around the second level. This isn't a game where you play it safe — it wants to keep you on edge.

Bedlam 2 is a representative of a specific type of entertainment that occasionally crawled out of some BBS activity or the demo scene in the nineties. It never had wide distribution, but whoever caught a glimpse of it remembers that relentless senseless brutality. Today it's obviously aged — there's nothing in it you won't find in a dozen modern mobile games at half the price, and without the authenticity of the DOS era, it'd only pull you in out of curiosity now and then.

It's worth a shot if you're in the mood for retro arcade without fancy design and without a story to back it up. It's like biting into hard candy — you want to know what it is and how it tastes, but you won't stick with it long. Fire it up in your browser for ten minutes and you'll have seen enough.