Dizzy - Prince of the Yolkfolk

I remember sitting at the keyboard wondering why this game kept calling me dizzy. Then it dawned on me — Dizzy, that round egg rolling across the screen — that's where the name came from literally. Codemasters took him through half a decade and a whole series of games, and this 1993 episode is one of the more modest ones.

Prince of the Yolkfolk is a platforming adventure, British in both its humor and its difficulty. Dizzy wakes up trapped in a cave, and his goal is to wake Princess Daisy, who's sleeping soundly somewhere in the castle tower — a classic fairy tale setup that serves only as a framework for a series of logic puzzles. The game isn't big, you can get through the map in an afternoon, but back then that was more of a feature than a flaw.

You play exactly the way you'd play any Dizzy game: you collect items, combine them in the right places, and move forward. Your inventory is limited to three items, which was a deliberate design choice to stretch out the game without adding content — you just had to make more trips. Dizzy rolls, jumps without much finesse, and one dip in the water or collision with an enemy costs you a life. Checkpoints didn't exist in the way we understand them today. Frustration came with the package.

I love the Dizzy series for the same reason I hate it — it's pure product of the British gaming school of the nineties, where difficulty and modest means replaced length. Prince of the Yolkfolk is one of the shorter and more accessible episodes, graphics decent for its time, music in chiptune style that burrows into your head before you can even mute it. What's aged worst is that jumping physics — the egg just doesn't behave like a game character you can rely on to land where you want.

These days it's worth trying if you're curious what adventures looked like before they had ambitions to be films. It's a small, honest game with no frills. You can fire it up in your browser through DOSBox emulators on Archive.org, and the whole thing takes less time than installing a modern AAA title. If that snappy British logic clicks with you, you'll be happy. If it doesn't, you'll figure that out in ten minutes.