Abbie!

2001 · puzzle · MS-DOS · Windows 3.x · Zoltán Kovács

Abbie! is a 2001 puzzle game created by Hungarian programmer Zoltán Kovács and published by Direct Logic Systems. I admit, despite this being another one of the hundreds of games of my childhood, I remember little about the puzzler. What I did not know was that it was actually a small-budget commercial game, with this one being shareware. I would have guessed it was just freeware, judging my the simplicity of the gameplay and graphics. Don't get me wrong, it is a cute game about a girl trying to save the world's last flowers while avoiding fire hydrants, pushing blocks, and mowing weeds Sokoban -style, and it is a break from the other, highly marketed commercial titles that tend to involve violence. However, the three expansion packs, which increase the number of levels from 20 to 80, were overpriced at the time. This version merely consists of the 20 shareware levels, but it is possible to create and modify levels by adding new DAT files in the format of lvl##?.dat , where "#" represents a digit and the "?" means that the filename may contain or omit the second digit. The digits only need to be set to the level number (e.g. lvl21.dat for level 21, lvl22.dat for level 22, etc.), and the game will detect and load those levels. Anyway, a sweet puzzle game to kill a few minutes, if nothing more. The Hungarian and English shareware versions were downloaded from My Abandonware (thanks to the website for hosting the game while I was still trying to find the obscure racing game. I would not have guessed that it was sold.). The game's official URL was directlogic.com . I was unable to upload version 2.20 for Windows due to it failing a virus check on VirusTotal.