Uncharted Waters: New Horizons

Imagine that the sea draws you not for its battles, but for the maps no one has drawn yet. Uncharted Waters: New Horizons is a strategy and simulation for the Super Nintendo that puts you on the deck of a sailing ship in the era of great overseas discoveries and gives you a freedom rarely found in the genre of that time.

Unlike straightforward strategy games, there is no single goal here. The game offers several playable characters with their own ambitions — one longs for trading wealth, another for the fame of a discoverer, yet another for a military career or for revenge. Depending on whom you choose, the tone of the whole game changes: one time you spend hours buying spices in one port and selling them profitably on the other side of the world, another time you chart unknown coastlines, hunt for treasure, or fight naval duels.

The game's strength lies in weaving economics, navigation, and exploration into one organic whole. You must watch your water and food supplies, crew morale, the condition of your ships, and the prices of goods, which fluctuate from port to port. Sailing by the stars and searching for new lands gives the game an air of adventure that purely spreadsheet-based simulators lack. It is a title that rewards patience and planning yet never lets you get bogged down in a single repetitive loop.

Graphically and sonically it is a solid representative of its era — colorful ports, a world map you gradually reveal, and music that underscores the atmosphere of distant lands. The pace is deliberate, but that is precisely what feels today like a pleasant counterpoint to frantic modern games. You sit down for the evening thinking you will just quickly reach the next port, and suddenly it is midnight.

New Horizons belongs among titles that were never as massively popular on consoles as action hits, but among fans of strategy and simulation it built a solid reputation as one of the more accessible gateways into the genre of trade and discovery. If you love the feeling that the world is open and you write your own story within it, this is the game for you.

Why play: An open naval simulation with several paths to glory that combines trade, exploration, and adventure into an addictive whole.