Trolls

Year 1992, eleven o'clock at night, parents in bed. Me at the monitor, the speaker chirping something the PC was trying to pass off as music, and trolls bouncing around on screen. Flair Software released Trolls back then — an unassuming action platformer for DOS that bet on a children's world of animated toys.

The concept is simple and nothing exceptional for its time: toys in a kid's bedroom come alive the moment the lights go out. From closets and floors emerges a realm full of moving obstacles, enemies, and collectibles. The player chooses from worlds made up of things that would normally lie scattered around a kid's room — or so the game's premise claims. Each world has four levels.

Gameplay is straightforward: movement, jumping, dodging enemies, and collecting stuff. Arrow keys and a few buttons — nothing that would surprise anyone in 1992. The character's movement is stiff just enough to frustrate you when you narrowly miss a jump, but not so much that you'd quit entirely. Difficulty scales linearly, no big surprises, no special weapon or ability system. Just a platformer doing what it's supposed to do, without fanfare.

Trolls belonged to the category of games that didn't reinvent the wheel — in 1992, dozens of similar titles floated around the PC market. Flair Software was a British developer that supplied the market with solid average productions, and this one fits right in. The EGA palette graphics do their job: environments are readable, characters recognizable. Sound from the PC speaker or Sound Blaster wasn't a technical marvel, but it didn't lag behind for the year of release. What seems bland today actually worked back then — and as a casual game after school, it was enough.

I'd recommend Trolls today to one specific type of player: someone who remembers similar games from their own childhood and wants to check whether memory really is as rosy as it seems. As a curiosity to kill half an hour in a browser, it makes sense — it's short, demands nothing, and takes up no more time than is healthy. But don't present it as a rediscovered gem. It was average back then and it's stayed average, which in a world of poor retro content is actually quite respectable.