Paganitzu

Paganitzu is one of Apogee's smaller gems, a top-down action-puzzle game released in 1991 in which archaeologist Alabama Smith explores a booby-trapped pyramid room by room. Each single-screen chamber is a self-contained puzzle: you shove boulders, collect keys to open matching doors, gather gold, and above all avoid the snakes, spiders and roaming hazards that patrol the tiles. The design owes an obvious debt to Sokoban and the classic 'push blocks in the right order' school of puzzling, but sharpens it with real-time enemies so that a wrong shove can trap you or leave you cornered.

The game grew out of an earlier freeware effort called Chagunitzu before being expanded and polished for the Apogee shareware model, which split it across episodes with the first one given away to hook players. Its bright EGA graphics and cheerful presentation gave it a friendlier face than many of its maze-and-monster contemporaries, and the puzzle escalation is nicely judged, gradually layering water, magic and moving blocks into the mix.

It holds up better than a lot of early-nineties action fare precisely because its appeal is cerebral rather than reflex-based. The controls are simple, the rules are legible at a glance, and the satisfaction of clearing a fiendishly arranged room is timeless. Anyone who enjoys thinking-person's arcade puzzlers like Boulder Dash or Sokoban will find Paganitzu an easy game to sink an afternoon into.