BOH is an intriguingly infuriating little game by Simone Bevilacqua. Ostensibly an action shooter, it looks like an old 8-bit Commodore 64 title and plays like an Apple IIe game. I could never decide whether I was enjoying it or not, which certainly says ... something ... about it.

You play the part of a tiny little gunman making its way through a series of connected rooms, on your way to the exit. What stands in your way is a host of enemies of differing behaviors. It's that simple.

Part of the problem lies in the control scheme; not so much the customization, as you can configure the keyboard to however you'd like, but the fact that when you turn your character, the entire screen rotates around your central point. This leads to severe disorientation in many cases, and simulation sickness in myself. In later levels, when you traverse a maze whose entirety is invisible until you breach each passage, losing your orientation can be critical.

The other issue is that you can only fire your weapon straight in front of you. So it's difficult to draw a bead on an enemy that moves randomly, especially when attempting to retreat and fire simultaneously. You do have the option to strafe move, but you move a little slower when you do, which poses its own problems.

There is a number of pick-up items that help you navigate the rooms, which stack up above each other in the early levels. You can pick up 360-degree vision, which helps you see the room all around you; varying strengths of flashlight; an automapper; and different levels of recharge, which mitigates the damage you take.

The automapper doesn't help much until the later levels, which get hairy enough that you won't actually have time to find your location. Complicating actual movement are various environmental hazards, such as crumbling floors that give way when standing upon them for too long; acid floors and electrified floors that cause damage when trod upon. Some obstacles are destructible, some are not.

The different enemies all take different numbers of hits before they're defeated, and all of them move in their own unique ways, and at varying speeds. You won't be able to leave the level until you walk over a death's head in the floor, which summons the "evil master", who is an enemy that takes a larger number of hits to dispatch, and who teleports randomly around, necessitating a search for his whereabouts to finish him off. I once found him a few rooms away, spinning in place, which made it really easy to kill him.

BOH is by no means a bad game, but I'd have preferred better graphics and a slightly different control scheme. Also, it would have been pleasant not to have gotten ill while playing. I'm just saying. You can grab the demo right here on Big Download for both Mac and PC.