You Have to Win the Game

A platform game with a simple goal, as its title points out. It's easier said than done, though - You Have to Win the Game focuses on exploration and tricky puzzles, making the task anything but straightforward. The subterranean game world twists from room to interconnected room of deadly pits, spikes, water bodies, moving pads, bizarre vegetation and unusual wildlife; the path is riddled with inaccessible areas, reachable only through finding some hidden device or object elsewhere in the depths - which may, in turn, block off other areas. Teleports, secret passages and strange spatial warps make the journey even more non-linear.

Your progress is marked as a percentage, which is increased by picking up collectible items scattered through the tunnels. Death can be fended off by using save points, indicated by a bell (and if that sounds too easy, a permadeath mode is available which disables the save points and grants you only a single life).

The game harkens back to the audio-visual experience of 1980s PCs, using 4-color CGA-style graphics and single-channel PC speaker sound effects (it even simulates an oldschool CRT monitor with visible curve and overscan). For players who crave more advanced, leading-edge hardware, a 16-color EGA tileset is also available.