Arac

Arac was published in 1986 by Addictive Games — a company otherwise famous for Kevin Toms' Football Manager — and it is one of the most inventive action adventures on the Commodore 64. Designed by Paul O'Malley, it reached America under the more descriptive name Spiderbot, because the star of the show is a robotic spider.

Your SpiderDroid roams a mechanical jungle a hundred screens large, and at first it cannot do much: walk, jump, throw nets. The nets are the key to everything. Capture an enemy and you inherit its talent — one creature can dig through soil, another grants a higher jump. The hunter gradually becomes a collector of abilities, and the game unfolds like a puzzle box: where can I reach now, and what do I need to catch to get further?

Scattered through the jungle are hidden parts of a robot body, and these unlock the showpieces — walking on ceilings, reversing gravity, throwing lightning. You will need all of it, because the goal is to break into the citadel and destroy its reactor within a thirty-minute time limit. If building the robot from scratch sounds like too much work, a shorter twenty-minute mode starts you fully assembled.

The contemporary press loved it; Zzap!64 rated it 93 percent and called it a rare example of a genuinely playable arcade adventure. Approached today, be ready to draw your own map, accept sound design so sparse that even the 1986 reviewers complained, and respect a clock that shows no mercy. Even so, Arac feels strikingly fresh: the steal-your-enemy's-ability idea works here years before it became fashionable.

You can try it at oldgame.cz directly in your browser, no installation needed.