It takes creative talent to program a game severely limited by its hardware by today's standards that makes the most out of what little it could have, and what little it does have. Chuck Sommerville showed his talent with Chip's Challenge, a top-down puzzle game that is deceptively simple, but is surprisingly frustrating if you are looking for casual play, which surprisingly for a puzzle game you will not be able to find here.
A schoolboy and computer nerd named Chip wants to join the computer club of Melinda, another nerd and schoolgirl, but he must first cross her clubhouse, a mysterious world where just about everything outlandish is to be expected. Chip must collect along the way computer chips while also making use of resources available to him to progress. The standard plot might not entail a sense of pseudo-thrills to be had from danger-ridden adventures like crystal caves and temples stowed with gold deposits in 1980s gaming, but it is compensated for by the game's equally minimalist elements, so it will do. You may be most familiar with the Windows version of the game since it was included in one of the Microsoft Entertainment Packs in 1992, but it was originally released for the Atari Lynx in 1989. My favorite versions are for Windows, DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST, the first because of the graphics and mouse support and the rest because of the graphical style faithful to the Lynx version and the animation of the graphics, which the former is missing. It should be stressed that using the mouse for movement has limitations, as Chip can be commanded to move anywhere on the screen as long as no more than two directions are involved. Any more will cause him to bump into a wall and stop there. The second pitfall is that the commands do not factor in hazards. Lastly, using the keyboard does not cancel out mouse commands, so if one frequently alternates between the two devices, similar trouble may ensue. It is quite frustrating since the mouse serves as a stressless alternative for what is best used with precision. At least using the mouse is not obligatory to play the game, and one uses the keyboard more often than not anyway.
In Chip's Challenge, creativity is making the most out of what little there is. Even with 144 levels (and very few cleverly secret ones), there is only one goal being to reach the exit under the two possible conditions of collecting enough chips and beating the clock, as well as only four colored door keys; items with which to cross tiles easily and safely; nine enemies referred to as monsters, each with their own properties and one of which is oddly frightening for reasons I will let you find out; pushable blocks; four colored buttons performing functions; and other obstacles. All of the game is confined within a board of 32 squares by 32 in an environment where the only controls are four keys for perpendicular movement. There is no looking ahead beyond four squares from the player's viewpoint, except when Chip is close to one of the board's sides, at which point the camera will not move further. I get impressions of playing something a bit more clever than Sokoban and Boulder Dash-two other even deceptively simpler games from the same decade. Blocks cannot be pulled and so may obstruct Chip, but he can push the blocks into the water to expand the floor. The monsters' behavior can be manipulated by digging sand. Even blocks sliding back to Chip will crush him, as does everything hazardous when stepped on. This game takes those elements and enhances them with more variety, leading to puzzles that involve cloning blocks and monsters, bombs to clear, and slippery ice to slide on.
I learned that patience and perseverance form the core of Chip's Challenge. Some puzzles involve lengthy tasks such as mazes and pushing blocks. The process can become mundane, but to be fair, the tedium normally occurs when one has already become good at the game and so would find earlier, unchallenging levels boring. And despite the gameplay being simple to learn and there being only four keys of movement, the game could not get any more callous. In fact, the clubhouse is filled with so many traps and hazards, running into any of which will kill Chip, and I can guarantee that anyone will die a ridiculous number of times before they complete the game. Under a few blocks are items or chips, and under a few others are booby traps. Arrowed and icy floors may drag Chip into imminent doom. Walking over thieves causes Chip to lose his gear with which to cross obstacles without trouble. You will gasp the moment a monster suddenly emerges from one of the sides of the screen and you quickly rush to stay out of its path. You almost certainly start off as unlucky, but as you fail and restart, you always come closer to discovering the way to complete a puzzle. It is not supposed to be a particularly intense experience, but it seems to be chaotic enough so as to not make it casual either.
And once you have completed all of the puzzles, you may be tasked with trying to find the secrets and Easter eggs or, for replay value, try to improve your personal bests by running Chip as fast as possible, which in retrospect is very ideal for speedrunning. Better yet, there exist community-made levels and level editors. I calculated how many theoretical levels there could be, which is at least (32²) ^ 92, or nearly nine thousand nonagintillion. As for the number of actually solvable levels, it is far much lower, but I am sure the number is still impossibly high, and if you go down that route, you are only beginning to discover the true size of an otherwise tiny game like Chip's Challenge.
The most grueling aspect I find about the game is one that hurts it the most. Every level must be completed without making any mistakes. There is no saving in-game, nor are there checkpoints or even a simple undo button, and with death inevitable at dozens or hundreds of points in anyone's first playthrough, it gets as good as it would suggest. Some of these mistakes result from me being simply dumb and not seeing the solution that is in front of me, but the rest involve walking straight into a hazard either by accident or by bad luck. It does strictly count as my fault, but human nature does not guarantee that we will not press the wrong button. Indeed, there are levels that can last as long as 15 minutes as one tries to find the solution. I have made quite a few such mistakes, and the time waste has been consistently irritating. At one point, I actually had to get out of my seat and walk around for a few seconds before returning to, and eventually completing, one puzzle. The bad luck part is sometimes caused by monsters occasionally occupying squares and being impossible to avoid after Chip uses a teleporter or slides on ice. In my entire playthrough, I do not recall ever seeing a monster *randomly* occupy one off-screen square instead of another and sliding on ice just to die to it, so technically it can be worked around. Still, it begs the question as to why there were no measures taken to cut the time loss and prevent parts of levels the player knows how to solve and has been solving from becoming boring. Redeemably, should you need to restart a level so many times that it is giving you grief, you are given the option to skip it.
VERDICT: It was difficult to assess the game's real difficulty because of the frustrations I experienced on the harder and longer levels, which does greatly affect my scoring, and occasionally pressing the wrong button as human nature does not help. However, I have determined that a lot of these frustrations can be avoided by maneuvering Chip more carefully, and the experience does get better when we are patient. Those looking for straightforward gaming probably will not find it here, and may never take the opportunity to complete the game, but if they are patient enough about completing it, there is a great sense of relief and satisfaction to be had in the end, and a good deal of fun and personal enjoyment along the way.
A schoolboy and computer nerd named Chip wants to join the computer club of Melinda, another nerd and schoolgirl, but he must first cross her clubhouse, a mysterious world where just about everything outlandish is to be expected. Chip must collect along the way computer chips while also making use of resources available to him to progress. The standard plot might not entail a sense of pseudo-thrills to be had from danger-ridden adventures like crystal caves and temples stowed with gold deposits in 1980s gaming, but it is compensated for by the game's equally minimalist elements, so it will do. You may be most familiar with the Windows version of the game since it was included in one of the Microsoft Entertainment Packs in 1992, but it was originally released for the Atari Lynx in 1989. My favorite versions are for Windows, DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST, the first because of the graphics and mouse support and the rest because of the graphical style faithful to the Lynx version and the animation of the graphics, which the former is missing. It should be stressed that using the mouse for movement has limitations, as Chip can be commanded to move anywhere on the screen as long as no more than two directions are involved. Any more will cause him to bump into a wall and stop there. The second pitfall is that the commands do not factor in hazards. Lastly, using the keyboard does not cancel out mouse commands, so if one frequently alternates between the two devices, similar trouble may ensue. It is quite frustrating since the mouse serves as a stressless alternative for what is best used with precision. At least using the mouse is not obligatory to play the game, and one uses the keyboard more often than not anyway.
In Chip's Challenge, creativity is making the most out of what little there is. Even with 144 levels (and very few cleverly secret ones), there is only one goal being to reach the exit under the two possible conditions of collecting enough chips and beating the clock, as well as only four colored door keys; items with which to cross tiles easily and safely; nine enemies referred to as monsters, each with their own properties and one of which is oddly frightening for reasons I will let you find out; pushable blocks; four colored buttons performing functions; and other obstacles. All of the game is confined within a board of 32 squares by 32 in an environment where the only controls are four keys for perpendicular movement. There is no looking ahead beyond four squares from the player's viewpoint, except when Chip is close to one of the board's sides, at which point the camera will not move further. I get impressions of playing something a bit more clever than Sokoban and Boulder Dash-two other even deceptively simpler games from the same decade. Blocks cannot be pulled and so may obstruct Chip, but he can push the blocks into the water to expand the floor. The monsters' behavior can be manipulated by digging sand. Even blocks sliding back to Chip will crush him, as does everything hazardous when stepped on. This game takes those elements and enhances them with more variety, leading to puzzles that involve cloning blocks and monsters, bombs to clear, and slippery ice to slide on.
I learned that patience and perseverance form the core of Chip's Challenge. Some puzzles involve lengthy tasks such as mazes and pushing blocks. The process can become mundane, but to be fair, the tedium normally occurs when one has already become good at the game and so would find earlier, unchallenging levels boring. And despite the gameplay being simple to learn and there being only four keys of movement, the game could not get any more callous. In fact, the clubhouse is filled with so many traps and hazards, running into any of which will kill Chip, and I can guarantee that anyone will die a ridiculous number of times before they complete the game. Under a few blocks are items or chips, and under a few others are booby traps. Arrowed and icy floors may drag Chip into imminent doom. Walking over thieves causes Chip to lose his gear with which to cross obstacles without trouble. You will gasp the moment a monster suddenly emerges from one of the sides of the screen and you quickly rush to stay out of its path. You almost certainly start off as unlucky, but as you fail and restart, you always come closer to discovering the way to complete a puzzle. It is not supposed to be a particularly intense experience, but it seems to be chaotic enough so as to not make it casual either.
And once you have completed all of the puzzles, you may be tasked with trying to find the secrets and Easter eggs or, for replay value, try to improve your personal bests by running Chip as fast as possible, which in retrospect is very ideal for speedrunning. Better yet, there exist community-made levels and level editors. I calculated how many theoretical levels there could be, which is at least (32²) ^ 92, or nearly nine thousand nonagintillion. As for the number of actually solvable levels, it is far much lower, but I am sure the number is still impossibly high, and if you go down that route, you are only beginning to discover the true size of an otherwise tiny game like Chip's Challenge.
The most grueling aspect I find about the game is one that hurts it the most. Every level must be completed without making any mistakes. There is no saving in-game, nor are there checkpoints or even a simple undo button, and with death inevitable at dozens or hundreds of points in anyone's first playthrough, it gets as good as it would suggest. Some of these mistakes result from me being simply dumb and not seeing the solution that is in front of me, but the rest involve walking straight into a hazard either by accident or by bad luck. It does strictly count as my fault, but human nature does not guarantee that we will not press the wrong button. Indeed, there are levels that can last as long as 15 minutes as one tries to find the solution. I have made quite a few such mistakes, and the time waste has been consistently irritating. At one point, I actually had to get out of my seat and walk around for a few seconds before returning to, and eventually completing, one puzzle. The bad luck part is sometimes caused by monsters occasionally occupying squares and being impossible to avoid after Chip uses a teleporter or slides on ice. In my entire playthrough, I do not recall ever seeing a monster *randomly* occupy one off-screen square instead of another and sliding on ice just to die to it, so technically it can be worked around. Still, it begs the question as to why there were no measures taken to cut the time loss and prevent parts of levels the player knows how to solve and has been solving from becoming boring. Redeemably, should you need to restart a level so many times that it is giving you grief, you are given the option to skip it.
VERDICT: It was difficult to assess the game's real difficulty because of the frustrations I experienced on the harder and longer levels, which does greatly affect my scoring, and occasionally pressing the wrong button as human nature does not help. However, I have determined that a lot of these frustrations can be avoided by maneuvering Chip more carefully, and the experience does get better when we are patient. Those looking for straightforward gaming probably will not find it here, and may never take the opportunity to complete the game, but if they are patient enough about completing it, there is a great sense of relief and satisfaction to be had in the end, and a good deal of fun and personal enjoyment along the way.
