1994, evening, my parents went to bed. A village full of mutated creatures slowly loads on the monitor, and I, fourteen years old, grip the mouse firmly and tell myself I'll turn it off in a moment. I didn't.

Ecstatica by one man — Andrew Spencer — is an action adventure set in a medieval village somewhere in the darkness of the early Middle Ages. You arrive there as a traveler, quickly discover that something very wrong is happening there, and even more quickly realize that the villagers won't be particularly welcoming. The atmosphere is thick from the first screen — corrupted, claustrophobic, with a hint of something pagan and unclean.

What stood out technically back then was an engine built on ellipses. No angular polygons like the competition — characters and enemies looked round, organic, almost like clay figures. The combination of pre-rendered backgrounds and this approach reminded you of Alone in the Dark, but the resulting impression was different, more raw and grotesque. The controls are tank-like, as was proper for the time — turn your character, move forward, strike. In combat it means tactical maneuvering rather than reflexes, but it doesn't exclude frustration. When two enemies attack you at once, you usually just die and learn to walk more carefully next time.

The game is remembered today for several reasons. First, the visuals were truly unusual in 1994 and still have their peculiar charm today — those round creatures almost look like they came from a small child's nightmare, not polygon exercises. Second, the atmosphere holds up. The sound design and music build tension without having to explain much. Third — and this is something that hasn't aged as gracefully — the game is brutally unforgiving in places, save points aren't always where you'd need them, and getting oriented in locations takes time that today's player might not want to spend.

Today, Ecstatica will be easiest to play for someone who loves survival horror in its prehistoric form and doesn't mind rough mechanics. If Alone in the Dark from 1992 or the first Resident Evil means something to you as a feeling — not as a precise comparison — then you know what you're getting into. You can run it in your browser via DOSBox without much fuss. Get an hour out of it, if only to see how one man in 1994 managed to make something that had its own face.