Catrap

Imagine a logic game from 1990 that lets you take time back and fix a wrong move — without restarting, without frustration. Sounds like a feature of modern games? Catrap could do it years before it was cool, and it is precisely this vision that makes it one of the most underrated titles on the Game Boy.

At first glance it is a logic platformer: you control a pair of characters you switch between, and your task is to clear each level of enemies and obstacles in the right order. You push blocks, climb, count steps — classic puzzle fun where the sequence of moves matters. But then comes the trick: whenever you make a mistake, you can rewind time and go back a move or several moves, instead of starting over from scratch.

Today the „undo“ function feels obvious to us, but at a time when games punished every mistake with a fresh start, it was a small revolution in design. This time-rewind mechanic only broke into wider awareness much later — think of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in 2003 or the independent sensation Braid. Catrap arrived at a similar idea quietly and more than a decade earlier, on an eight-bit handheld.

Thanks to this, Catrap is not only a clever puzzle game with a pleasantly escalating difficulty, but also a fascinating piece of gaming history. It rewards experimentation — because a mistake costs no more than a few moves back — and thereby encourages you to play with each challenge until you find an elegant solution.

Like so many visionary titles on the Game Boy, Catrap stayed out of the spotlight, and yet it deserves to be mentioned every time the origin of the time-rewind mechanic in games comes up.

Why play it: A clever logic platformer with a time-rewind mechanic that was more than ten years ahead of its time; a visionary title as instructive as it is fun.