Skunny - Special Edition

Skunny bounces across the screen like possessed, and you need to watch so he doesn't fall into a chasm. Which is basically the whole game — a platformer from 1995, when such titles were being born by the dozen. The maker remains shrouded in mystery to this day, but it appeared on DOS and older folks remember it as one of those nameless things scattered across game code disks.

You control a little critter jumping across stones, pipes and platforms, collecting items, avoiding enemies. A standard that already existed a thousand times over in the nineties. The goal is always the same — get from the left edge to the right, up, down, here and there, without falling to your death. Skunny has no special abilities, doesn't double-jump, nothing that sets it apart. It just jumps and collects stuff.

What actually makes playing not straightforward isn't good design, but precise jump physics — that bare kind that always leaves you a few pixels short of the goal. The graphics are colorful, but bland, without personality. Sound? DOS beeping, nothing you'd carry in your head. Levels are simple, easily predictable, so unless you're five years old in 1995, it probably takes you twenty minutes to figure out how the game mechanics work.

Skunny Special Edition is a captivating historical curiosity, but only as a scrap of MS-DOS history shouted into the void. It's not a bad game, more like forgotten, which is its greatest promise. In the nineties there were hundreds like it, all huddled on disks next to Doom and Prince of Persia. Nothing else, except to be played.

Today you play it in a browser purely out of nostalgia. There's no fun in it, but a quiet joy from having just stepped back into a time when computer games didn't need to be genius — it was enough that they existed. And Skunny exists. It wants nothing more.