Chao Adventure 2

One shooter, one sword, one flight through a dark tower full of riffraff — and nothing will give you more joy than hearing your magic blaze against stone walls.

Chao Adventure 2 is a hallucinogenic mess of everything creators managed to dump together with a heavy hand on MS-DOS in the early millennium. A shooter with RPG elements, where magic recharges time just like health. Characters change, the tower grows, item collection is a goal in itself. There's no story in the classic sense — there's the feeling you're walking through something absolutely personally twisted.

The game controls like an old piece — keyboard steers movement, sword swings, magic activates, while enemies run across the screen with the intelligence of a schoolkid on Friday. It wasn't an elegant approach, but it worked. The graphics have that strange pixel-art charm, as if painted by someone who saw Spacecrusade and decided to do something worse and more interesting. Sound — well, sound existed. Pretty loudly.

Chao Adventure 2 got lost in the nineties among a series of titles that did basically the same thing, but without such personal madness. It remained a forgotten thing for those who happened to stumble upon it in demos or bundles. Technically it was a weak effort — nothing much on performance, nothing much on gameplay, nothing much at all. But that downright weird feeling the whole thing breathed made it something that kept coming back.

Today it's mostly time spent in a museum. Pulling it up in a browser or emulator makes sense when you want to feel how the creators tried and what they dared attempt. It's not a masterpiece — it's an attempt that the era didn't laugh at, and which came out of it strangely lonely.