Nebulus

Nebulus is an original platformer from Hewson Consultants in which the player, as the small creature Pogo, spirals around tall towers rising from the sea, trying to bring them down before he himself plunges. The tower keeps rotating on screen along with the character, so the player only ever sees part of the structure they're climbing, dodges enemies trying to knock him down, and jumps between platforms, ladders and elevators — this rotating-tower principle made Nebulus one of the most inventive platformers of its era, and the player constantly had to guess what was hiding beyond the visible edge of the screen, with no way to see the whole route ahead of time, which fundamentally set the game apart from simpler platformers with fixed, visible paths. Gradually, the player had to conquer an entire series of towers scattered across different seas, each offering a different platform layout and enemy types, so the player couldn't rely on a single tried-and-true approach and had to learn new layouts again and again.

Graphically, the game relied on a simple but readable design with a strong sense of height and the danger of falling into the sea, complemented by memorable music from David Whittaker that rounded off the game's unmistakable atmosphere. The ZX Spectrum version was among the best-rated conversions, even though the original concept was created simultaneously on several eight-bit platforms, each with a slightly different technical handling of the rotation and the coloring of the sea and sky.

Thanks to its fresh idea, Nebulus earned a permanent place among the genre's classics and was repeatedly praised in contemporary reviews for the originality and appeal of its core game idea. It later received a remake as well as a sequel on newer platforms. Even today the game captivates by how a simple rotating-tower mechanism managed to generate dozens of differently solved levels and how well it worked even with the limited resources of contemporary hardware, without tiring the player through repetition.

Why play it: For the fresh idea of a rotating tower that squeezed dozens of cleverly differentiated levels out of a simple principle – a great choice for platformer fans seeking originality.