Freaks

When I first got into Freaks, I expected a sidescroller. Instead I got some kind of wild mix — puzzles and action mixed into a game that isn't entirely sure what it wants to be. Yet I remember it more for being different from the others.

It's a pretty strange thing from 1993. You play as some guy navigating colorful levels full of various obstacles and enemies. It's not a pure platformer — more something between a puzzle and an action game where I can't just jump over things. I have to break them, go around them, move them, wait a bit. The game won't tell me exactly what my goal is, and I wander around trying to figure out what's happening around me.

Controls are precise but slow and clunky. Movement feels like the character is wading through honey. When I want to jump over an obstacle, it takes a while for the character to decide. This isn't a bug — it's an artistic choice. Around the fiftieth level (approximately), it starts to get frustrating. The game isn't hard on reflexes, it just demands patience and the ability to experiment. Sometimes I fall asleep at it, and not in a good way.

Visually, Freaks is torn between two extremes. Some sprites are fairly detailed, others look like they were drawn by someone using only one hand. The color palette is too vivid, sometimes downright painful. Music? Simple, repetitive melodies that settle in your head like ants. After twenty minutes I turn it off.

Today I look at Freaks through a romantic nineties filter — as a curiosity from a smaller studio that tried to do something of its own. It stayed in memory as a bizarre thing. If you want to try what was happening on the fringe of the game industry in the early nineties, give it a shot. If you're expecting a classic, you've got the wrong game.