Early '90s sci-fi adventure Hamlet was innovating on the survival horror genre before it even existed

Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.

At a glance Hamlet looks like just another dungeon crawler to add to the already enormous '90s pile. There's the screen-clogging UI. There's the crude first-person view. There's a bunch of stats, menus, and equipment with AWK ENG ABBRV endemic to the genre because there just wasn't the space for anything longer. I may as well dust off my graph paper and get stuck in.