what an incredible little gem

the fool's errand is my favorite kind of puzzle. it's daring enough to explain virtually nothing about itself and confident enough in its own designs to remain unsolvable without fully understanding all of its machinations

i hate to be that guy, but i'm gonna be that guy: it really does make you feel like The Fool™. this whole thing starts off seemingly aimless, but it's always angled in such a way that rewards perseverance. there's a healthy balance of rudimentary, complicated and downright irritating challenges that just - push you forward in some manner. i went in expecting a cute, quaint, early CD-ROM era time killer but instead found the better chunk of my free time being engulfed by this - shockingly well-written - short story for almost two weeks. i'd recommend you do the same

a word on versions, though: you should absolutely play this game in its original macintosh form. the colorized DOS and amiga ports, while charming in their own right, completely pale in comparison to the stark, beautiful black and white visuals of the original (now freeware) release. cliff johnson himself recommends playing via a macintosh emulator (i suggest mini vmac. it's easy to set up on mac and pc alike) and i echo that sentiment

a heartfelt thanks to my friend for stumbling upon this game one evening while we were searching for a way to emulate maze wars+ ...now finish your errand, dammit

on paper this is just a mediocre movie tie-in, but in execution... no yeah it's exactly that

biggest issue of all with id4 is that it's fucking boring. there's 13 stages and while they're mostly pretty visually appealing, objective variety wears thin after the third one. a dull drone permeates this whole game and it's only perpetuated by the total absence of music. you'd probably fall asleep pretty easily if not for being constantly engaged wrestling the flight controls, which i can charitably describe as some of the worst to grace the genre

instead of letting you manually tilt/roll/yaw, the dpad points your plane in desired directions while incomprehensible physics(?) do their best to snap the thing wherever the nearest layer on the z-axis happens to be. it's practically grid based despite existing in 3d space. maneuvering between buildings is like trying to navigate a magnetic ball through a maze of identically-charged walls; it feels like fucking shit

also the draw distance sucks and your radar is annoyingly touchy. game's shit. happy 4th of july. welcome to earth, etc.