Cyrus

When I first launched Cyrus, I expected a strategy game. Instead, I found myself in a dark maze with a single weapon and a horde of the fastest enemies DOS memory could handle. Cyrus is essentially one of those games that looks like something grand, but is really just an undefended shooter into the void.

It's an early DOS first-person shooter from the mid-eighties, back when graphics were drawn with ASCII characters and people believed this approach would be the future. You navigate procedurally generated mazes, shoot monster-like creatures, collect items. The goal is simple — get to the end of the level alive. Nothing more, nothing less. The creatures around you respond to your movements like piranhas to blood — the moment they spot you, they attack mercilessly.

The controls are hell from the good old days when PCs were operated through keyboards and that was your only tool. Movement, shooting, turning — everything mapped to number keys and arrows. The graphics are, to be honest, awful — white lines on a black background could use something visually more appealing. The game behaves hostilely toward the player, and that's actually its best quality. If two enemies catch you in the maze at once, you're done for. There's no sprinting, no hiding — just pure survival. Every step is a calculation.

Cyrus is proof that in the eighties, you'd play anything if it was something new. ASCII graphics look comically dated now, the controls would cause despair in modern tests. But that very uncompromisingness — that brutal simplicity without soft hints and suggestions — that's what makes it interesting. It's not a game you'd enjoy playing. It's a game you'd play because it existed.

Today you'd only look at it for historical reasons. Emulators handle it without problems, and if you love retro pride with miserable graphics and stubborn gameplay, Cyrus gives you exactly what you want. Everyone else will appreciate it merely as a curious anecdote from the afterlife of computer games.