#54: Spellbound Dizzy (Codemasters, Amiga, 1991)

The vast majority of your time in Spellbound Dizzy will be spent carting rocks back and forth from the quarry to the shaft. It’s not difficult. There’s no challenge involved. It’s just a bunch of mind-numbing tedium blocking your access to the ostensibly fun parts of the game.

This is the last Dizzy game we’ll be looking at here. It’s not quite the last game in the series – they beat out two more releases from its shambling corpse before giving up the ghost entirely – but this game shows a franchise that has not some much passed its peak as fallen off the edge of a cliff. And yet, at the time, it was fairly well received. Why? What on Earth did they see in it? Was there an audience clamouring for a retelling of the myth of Sisyphus in video game form that I just don’t know about?

I mean, we’ve talked before about the sadism of the Dizzy series, and indeed of video games in general, but this is something else entirely. It’s one thing to punish players for their imperfections. Even when those imperfections are along the lines of ‘failed to anticipate a completely invisible and deadly trap’, you can at least feel that the punishment being doled out has some justification, even if that justification is staggeringly unfair. But Spellbound isn’t punishing you for any imperfections, imagined or otherwise. It’s just punishing you.