Impossible Mission
1984
Audio: English
- platform
- puzzle
- arcade
- action
- science fiction
- stealth
- single player
The story
The situation: for three days have the strategic central computers of the great powers acted up. An unknown person manipulates their programmes; at the end of these programmes is the starting command for the intercontinental rocket. The countdown is on, only 6 hours keep the humanity from an atomic inferno. An unknown person? Only professor Elvin, the insane computer expert could crack the top secret start code, Elvin, who entrenches himself in his intangible subterraneous, guarded by 90 murderous robots, that until now had hunted down every intruder. No one who has ever set foot on the lift to Elvins cave labyrinth has returned back alive. The last hope: Special Agent 4125, the most cunning, toughest and most indiscriminate man, that the secret service can offer. Only ice cold reckoning and superior physical condition give this unarmed hero a tiny chance to avert the disaster in the last minute. The game: your task is to put a stop to evil Elvin Atombender's game. For this you have to enter in his laboratory, protected by a vault somewhere on his underground stronghold. To open the laboratory's door you need a nine letters password, each letter of which Elvin coded into a punchcard, just for cutting in four each one of them, painting them in different colors and hiding the resulting pieces everywhere in his base's furniture. So all you have to do is search into every object of every room for pieces of puzzle while surviving the robots, the pits and doctor Elvin's annoying voice, retrieve all the 36 pieces, put them together in groups of four, and head for the laboratory, where an unpleasant surprise waits you
What it’s like
Hard-edged 8-bit minimalism: a flat, primary-coloured palette of rooms drawn in thin outlines, a cold grey-blue backdrop, and a tiny sprite running through a grid of identical chambers that feels like a schematic rather than a place. Sound is sparse and mechanical, with rising bleeps, the clack of lifts, and a synthetic voice mocking every misstep, so the silence between hazards does much of the work. The pace is deliberate and fiddly, a stop-start search in which you open furniture, dodge patrolling robots, and time jumps across pits, building a tense, dry, faintly comic dread rather than spectacle. Its vibe is cool, clinical paranoia with a sly sense of humour, best suited to a late evening at the desk or a retro session with the clock ticking. Violence is abstract and bloodless: robots zap you and you restart, with no gore and no sexual content, though the constant fear of a sudden death and the mocking villain can be stressful. It suits players who enjoy old-school puzzle-platforming, methodical memory-based exploration, and the satisfaction of cracking a tightly built system under pressure.
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