Terror of the Catacombs

A frozen hero in a blue shirt slides down a rope into a dark tunnel, and his front tooth is already about to bite the mud. That's how Terror of the Catacombs begins, and when you return to DOS after twenty years, that blue guy isn't a joke anymore — he's pure nineties reality, when every animation happened frame by frame.

This is a classic platformer from 1993, when heroes didn't tremble with emotion but charged straight ahead and downward. The journey through the catacombs is a linear affair — move left, move right, jump, collect some things, escape from something that wants to get you. The sound from the PC hisses and buzzes, the graphics are colored blocks with double pixels and character height about fifteen dots. Everything simple, serious, and without frills.

Playing it doesn't differ from a dozen similar games — you collect items, jump across platforms, and creatures try to get you. The controls are classic, the character's response precise, but the delay between command and movement is what it was when the processor was called 386 and had millions of transistors instead of billions. The game isn't hard because it's mean — rather because you can't predict much what will happen a meter ahead of you.

I'm not taking anything back and I'm not claiming it's a hidden gem. The contribution is zero, the design was already old in 1993, and today it's just a curiosity. Probably made by a junior or hobbyist. Still — and here's the genius trick of these programs — it has such pure content of that era that you watch it almost like a film about the past.

Today you can play it in DOSBox or in a browser through an emulation site. Five, ten minutes of entertainment, then you close it and return to something that kept evolving. But if you're interested in what games looked like when Doom tore down the shack and Doom II sliced it into even smaller, quieter pieces, this is pretty legitimate reading.