Rusty (PC-98)

Rusty is a gothic side-scrolling action game released for the NEC PC-9801 series on 16 July 1993 by the dōjin studio C-Lab. Players guide vampire-huntress Rustea “Rusty” Sprincul (with her helpful owl) through 10 non-linear stages filled with keys, traps, and Castlevania-style bosses, whipping foes and swinging from rings. Each stage ends in a set-piece boss fight; collecting sub-weapons enables “Mind Slasher” power crashes such as time-slow or invulnerability. The retail edition shipped on five 3.5-inch floppy disks and came with a colour manual; despite never receiving an official translation, a fan patch added English text in 2017. Contemporary and modern critics alike praise its fluid control, FM/MIDI soundtrack by Kajihara Masahiro et al., and deliberately “classic-vania” level design, calling it one of the PC-98’s standout pure-action titles.