Asylum is one of those games that looks a bit rubbish, but – when you get into playing it – you gradually realise that it’s actually really rather good.

It’s a scrolling, run-and-gun-style platform game with cartoony graphics and bouncy jumping, and you pick up better weapons and collect bonus items for extra points.

You’re a kid with a gun exploring the mind of a crazy person, called Sigmund, and you have to resolve his mental instability by blasting malfunction brain cells…

What makes Asylum good are the controls (the feel of the game is challenging but fair), and the level designs, which are huge and also quite complex. There are three levels to play, which you can choose from the menu. They’re all different in terms of layout and colour schemes, and they each have different enemies and traps.

As I hinted at earlier: graphically Asylum is not great. The main character looks like a cartoon version of Angus (AD/DC) Young, and God knows what’s going on with the information panel at the bottom… But in spite of that, playing the game is quite a bit of fun. Even now. It’s one of the better platform games on the Archimedes.

Asylum was developed and published by Digital Psychosis in 1993.

More: Asylum on Moby Games