The Collection Chamber: SKYROADS: THE KOSMONAUT COLLECTION

Pilot your starglider on a 'road' through space, avoiding obstacles and holes along the way, and without running out of fuel or oxygen. Full version includes 30 roads in 10 areas.

~ Mobygames description

Atari's 1984 classic I, Robot was revived with a remake on Steam earlier this year, and I keep jumping back to it for a quick play. The original is a classic, but for some reason it seems to be intrinsically linked to another classic game - in my mind at least. That game is SkyRoads (previously known as Kosmonaut) by Estonian Shareware developers Bluemoon Interactive.

I don't know why my brain links these two. Perhaps I discovered both at around the same time and the similarity in viewpoint and penchant for checkerboarded grid-based stages fused them together in my neural pathways. In truth, the two play very differently. I, Robot has you control a 3D automaton in what is essentially an arcade shooter mixed with Pac-Man. SkyRoads has you pilot a little sprite-based star-glider dodging hazards on alien highways suspended in space. Either way, my recent trips Atari's oft-forgotten classic brought this game to mind and its Christmas-themed addon made it perfect choice to dust it off this holiday season.

The aim of the game is to avoid obstacles and jump over pits at the highest speed possible (left, Kosmonaut)
If you crash, you will get mocked. A feature found only in the first game (right, Kosmonaut).

You may not realise it, but Bluemoon are actually quite and eventful presence in the history of the internet. Their small team were behind the peer-to-peer file-sharing program Kazaa which was ubiquitous in the early 2000s. This was before the age of BitTorrent when Napster and eDonkey were competing with each other, but Kazaa was the one I remember using the most. But before the inevitable lawsuits and proclamations of piracy, Bluemoon made games. Their first was Kosmonaut, and it ultimately became the first Estonian computer game ever published abroad.

When you boot up Kosmonaut today, the low-colour EGA graphics may not look pleasing to the eye, but for a game from 1990 it plays remarkably smooth. The blocky pseudo-3D platforms zoom at you at a blistering pace that truly tests your reflexes. You press the up and down arrows to control your hovercraft's speed, and the left and right arrows to move its position so you can avoid the obstacles scattered on the course. You can also jump with a tap of the spacebar, allowing you to clear gaps in the road. It makes for a mercilessly difficult game with stages shifting in complexity from one to the other. While certainly completable - enough so that the game's readme will directly tell you this ("There IS a solution for every stage! There are NO bugs!") - the unexpected and early spikes in challenge do more to diminish the experience than elevate it. More than once I caught myself swearing at the computer screen as I mis-timed a jump that left my little hovercraft plunging off into the blackness of space. But, if you have the patience, you do get infinite retries to keep the pain from fully morphing into punishment. You crash, you reload, you crash again. Over time, you learn the layouts of each stage until it become little more than muscle memory to reach its end. It may be brutally difficult, but Kosmonaut has that grimy, punky charm that only shareware games could get away with.

The same stage as it appears in SkyRoads (left) and its unreleased Beta, Cosmonaut 2 (right).
Notice the change in camera angle and vanishing point that makes the Beta slightly harder to play.

A few years later, Bluemoon would come back to this concept with a sequel. It boasted better graphics, music, extra gameplay mechanics and, before a brief stint of being called Cosmonaut 2, it became the company's signature work: SkyRoads. Build-wise, Cosmonaut 2 - whose unreleased Beta became widely available on abandonware sites - already has nearly all the core mechanics of SkyRoads, but the stage ordering, color palettes, and even some visual choices are different. The camera angle and vanishing point is a little different, which adds an extra sense of speed and vertigo, but it also affects depth perception making jumps far harder to judge. An interesting artifact, but the fully finished SkyRoads that finally came to market in 1993 is the one to play.

Other than the graphics, which have been greatly improved, the biggest update is a layering of new game mechanics. You don't just hop-and-hope anymore. Now you have oxygen meters, a fuel gauge and a "grav-o-meter" that decides how floaty or heavy gravity feels on a given level. The controls may be exactly the same as Kosmonaut, but it's everything else that makes this sequel superior.

The colours on these roads now have unique properties. Dark grey or "Slippery" tiles forces your craft to move and slide at its current direction momentum. Naturally, a big hole will troll you on the other side. Dark green or "Sticky" tiles make you brakes hard, which can be used to your advantage if you play it right. Light green or "Boost" tiles do the opposite, so if you can't tell the difference between the two greens you're screwed. Light red or "Burn" tiles instantly explode your ship upon the briefest of touches. I always seemed to get caught out on this one. Lastly, blue or "Supply" tiles refills your oxygen and fuel levels. All other colours do nothing, so you better not be colour blind so you can tell the difference.

The addition of special tiles adds to the difficulty (left, SkyRoads).
These blue tiles will replenish you rapidly depleting oxygen and fuel (right, Xmas Special).

Each level ends in a tunnel that spits you back into space - otherwise known as the level select screen. Because all 30 roads are unlocked (in the full version at least), you can get a sneak peak at just how obscene later levels can be. Personally, I tended to replay the ones I enjoyed most to see how perfect a speed run I could get. Some of the levels are unforgivingly brutal, but when it clicks and everything lines up perfectly - tiles line up, gravity cooperates, and you nail the perfect jump - you feel like a exhilarated daredevil of cosmic proportions.

If you've seen the goal of all 30 stages, why not try 30 more but with a Santa hat. In 1994, Bluemoon dropped a festive treat with SkyRoads: Xmas Special. The roads are new, the mechanics the same, but it's all decked out in boughs of holly. Or Santa-crabs. The only thing that's actually Christmassy about all of this are the backgrounds. Planets, suns and space nebulas give way to reindeers at spaceports, a warehouse of wrapped presents or - bizarrely - an underwater scene of crabs dressed like Father Christmas. It's all great fun until you realise that the difficulty has increased even further than the punishing original.

SkyRoads: The Kosmonaut Collection as a series is a pure distillation of what made early-90s shareware PC gaming so memorable. It's a simple pick-up-and-play premise that's perfectly programmed to scratch that arcadey itch at a cheap price point. It is punishing. It is inconsistent. Sometimes it feels downright unfair. But this is the ultimate "git gud" game, and when you get there there's nothing quite like it.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox to bring the game to modern systems. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 21.1 Mb. Install Size: 52.8 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

Download

KOSMONAUT

SKYROADS

XMAS SECIAL

COSMONAUT 2 BETA

KOSMONAUT