Time Bandit

I remember that feeling when I first launched a game that, without a single word of explanation, handed me a weapon and said: survive. Time Bandit from 1988 was exactly that kind of game.

It's an action arcade with a maze-like setting — the player moves through various worlds, collects items, fights enemies, and searches for the way forward. Each level is different, almost a different genre in miniature: sometimes you sneak through a medieval castle, other times you wander sci-fi corridors. This genre-mixing was a fairly bold move at the end of the eighties, and the game benefited from it more than you'd expect.

The controls are straightforward — movement, attack, interaction with the environment. The game is played from above, the view is isometric, the pace is moderate. The main fun comes from exploration: every world hides items, secret passages, and enemies with different behaviors. The difficulty isn't entirely fair — the game sometimes kills you almost without warning, and saving in the old-school sense was more of a wish than reality. Those who remember that era know what I'm talking about.

What set Time Bandit apart from the sea of similar maze games of that time was precisely that thematic variety. It wasn't just one hero in one world, but rather a sort of compendium of mini-adventures. The graphics on PC were functional, not dazzling — the versions for Atari ST or Amiga looked noticeably better, so the DOS version is simply the poorer cousin of the original. The sound matched the capabilities of the old PC speaker — beeps and cracks — but that was the norm in 1988, not an exception.

Today the game has aged the way games of this type age — respectably, but without much grace. Those who played it as children will find the imprint of something familiar. Those seeing it for the first time will fumble about for a while before understanding what it actually wants from them. There's no tutorial, no modern conveniences, but that raw quality has its own charm. Time Bandit didn't deserve to remain as forgotten as it did.

These days, anyone playing it in a browser will enjoy it most if they like exploration, don't mind trial and error, and don't need the game to tell them every five minutes how well they're doing. Half an hour, peace and quiet, and a little patience — that's all it takes to understand why this game in 1988 didn't leave computers all afternoon long.