Zomb's Lair

I can't decide if Spaceship Warlock is pure genious, the result of some kind of insane fever dream, or just completely bonkers. It's extremely weird whatever the case.

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When you consider that it was made by two guys in 1991 - two years before games like Myst and Journeyman Project - it's actually pretty damn impressive. Doing some research on it, it would seem that it was actually a pretty big deal and fairly successful on Mac, where it was originally released, It didn't see a Windows release until 1994, which is probably a significant factor in its relative obscurity.

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The game itself is... well it's odd. It's quite short if you actually know what you're doing - probably about an hour or so. But uh... therein kinda lies the problem. Spaceship Warlock suffers from "Let's try to figure out what not-obvious thing they want me to do now"-syndrome. I'm all for games not holding my hand - I think modern games have a bad tendency to do this far more than is needed - but Spaceship Warlock takes that one step further by giving you very little indication of what you're supposed to be doing in even a vague sense or how to go about it even if you knew. This is primarily due to the text-parser elements, which have had the tendency to be frustrating since their inception. Don't feel too bad if you end up consulting a walkthrough.

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All of that said, it's very impressive graphically (for the time) and has this really unique vibe that honestly doesn't feel much like anything else I've ever played.

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It's an interesting bit of gaming weirdness for sure.