Monsoon

Monsoon is a wizard in a gray hat—it vanishes from your sight before you see it clearly. A game without an author's name, without promises on the cover, without explanation of what's really happening. It's just there, in DOS, waiting.

It's a puzzle you understand only halfway. On screen you see something like a weather map or abstract grid with stripes and fields. Your task is unclear—you move elements, rotate them, combine colors or connections. The game tells you nothing more. Instructions are missing, manuals are missing, you have to figure out the logic yourself. In the nineties that was normal: take a demo, wrestle with it and either you figure it out or you don't.

Monsoon has something of Japanese puzzle games that nobody in Europe paid attention to for a long time. You progress through levels—the further you go, the nastier the logic gets. Colors change, number of moves is limited, some elements break the usual rules. You experience more frustration than eureka, but occasionally—when angular shapes finally fit together—you feel the game laughing at its secret and you're part of it.

It left no traces in history. Nobody ever put it on a pedestal and reviews for it are barely written. But it exists. It's quietly there in an archive of old games as a reminder of when a few people could just program a puzzle and release it to the world without a single comment. Great, bad, doesn't matter. It was there.

Playing it today means entering darkness without a torch. There's nothing in it that would captivate you with novelty, but nothing that would bother you either. Just silence, colors and clear instructions: solve it or move on. That's exactly where its strange charm lies.