Silly Knight is one of 6 brand new DOS games you can play today

This month Czech retro gaming site High-Voltage.cz ran a competition for DOS games, specifically MS-DOS 6.22 games in text mode that could be run on a 486DX / 50MHz with 8MB of RAM. Fortunately you can also play them on a more modern machine thanks to DOSBox.

The six entries can be downloaded from the link in the blue box on this page. They include a sci-fi shooter called Space Assault and a dungeon crawler called Dungeons of Noudar, but the overall winner was action platformer Silly Knight.

Silly Knight is about stabbing skeletons and bats (who follow the floaty trajectory bats are required by law to follow in games), while collecting keys to unlock doors. You have three hearts of health to see you through, and they refill when you pass a checkpoint by lighting a fire in a sconce. It's a hell of a thing for creator Petr "AfBu" Kratina to have squeezed into a 34KB zip file, and you can find at DOS Haven.

Good luck! You'll need it.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.