Rock 'n Roll – Dynamic Visions/Rainbow Arts - 1989 - First time playing?: Yes!

Sometimes I'll start playing something with the intention of covering it on my site, only to end up dropping it for one reason or another and move onto something else. Maybe the game just isn't interesting enough to inspire writing much about. Maybe the difficulty level is too high and I don't want to stress myself out trying to beat it. Rock ‘n Roll nearly fell into this category of dropped games. I wasn't feeling it on my first play session, but then I was compelled to come back. And then I came back again and again and genuinely came to really enjoy it. Rock ‘n Roll isn't quite what I'd call a great game. It's definitely got its fair share of annoyances and questionable design, but did I enjoy it? Absolutely. With some caveats.

In short, Rock ‘n Roll is a marble rolling game akin to Marble Madness, but viewed from top down as opposed to from an isometric angle. You'll use the mouse to guide your ball through labyrinths, avoid falling off the level, account for the physics, speed and inertia that come from controlling a rolling ball, as well as other obstacles that can influence your control such as slopes, fans and magnets. Sometimes you'll also have to deal with slippery ice floors which you have less traction on, or arrow tiles that push your ball in the direction they are pointing when you roll over them. There’s also a variety of damaging hazards that drain your ball’s energy, such as crushers, electrified floors, laser beams and explosions. Once your energy hits zero, your ball is shattered and you lose a life.

All of that is pretty standard, but where Rock ‘n Roll ends up differentiating itself from other marble rolling games is in its heavy emphasis on puzzles and power up usage. Throughout every level you'll find gold coins that can then be used to purchase items from various shops scattered throughout the game. These items include parachutes that can be used to save your ball if it falls off the level, pickaxes which can be used to build new floor tiles over bottomless pits and bombs which both destroy walls adjacent to them as well as building floor tiles over bottomless pits within their blast radius like the pickaxe does. You can also purchase temporary power ups from these shops as well. These include the speedup power up which is self explanatory, the spike ball power up which allows you to traverse ice tiles without slipping as well as nullify the effects of the magnets and fans, and finally the armour ball which gives you the ability to break down cracked walls by smashing your ball into them with enough force.

These items and power ups are finite, so you need to figure out exactly where to use all of them in order to get to the level exit. What's the minimum amount of pickaxes you can use to cross over to the other platform? Do you need to buy every item and power-up in the level, or can you save your coins for the next level? Even the coloured keys you’ll find scattered throughout every level are a limited resource you need to think carefully about your usage of, as most levels contain more locked doors than there are keys. Furthermore, cracked tiles that crumble away into nothing when you roll over them require further planning ahead to ensure you don’t strand yourself on a platform or otherwise wall yourself off from progress. In short, resource management and planning ahead are integral. Even your energy is a resource to manage, as you can purchase items at the cost of your energy being severely reduced if you don’t have enough coins to afford the item in question.

This is all a surprising amount of depth already, but what makes Rock ‘n Roll such a joy to play for me is just how wonderfully buttery smooth the controls are. By using a mouse in the same way Marble Madness used a trackball in the arcade, you have wonderfully precise, responsive, smooth and weighty analog movement that is damn impressive for 1989 and remains a tactile stim to this day. Everything about this game visually is smooth, from the framerate, to the scrolling, to even the animation of your ball rolling which my 20FPS gifs are really not going to do justice to. Not only that, but the ball animations add an extra layer of visual feedback, with the speed and direction you see the pattern on the ball rotating in matching your mouse movements. This is one of those games that I think is honestly enhanced by using an old mouse with a trackball in it like the Amiga uses. The physical feeling of rolling a ball across your desk while a ball on-screen mirrors those same movements really creates a satisfying one-to-one feeling of control. Even when I lost and had to restart, I was still having fun just because controlling the game felt so good. Just remember to keep your mouse clean, of course.

So, why am I hesitant to call Rock 'n Roll a ‘good’ game? Well, the primary reason is that every single level in this game can potentially become unwinnable by design. Yes, even the tutorial level. As established, you have a finite amount of money, items and power ups, and should you use any of them in the wrong place, the level is essentially soft locked, requiring you to restart at the cost of one of your extra lives. I'm not opposed to this style of design in a puzzle game to be clear. Lemmings is like that and I love that game enough to have it as my best man for my wedding. But the difference is that Lemmings levels are much shorter than Rock ‘n Roll’s lengthy labyrinths so you lose far less progress any time you have to restart, and additionally, Lemmings gives you unlimited retries. For a game where accidentally using a key in the wrong door can irreparably screw up your run and force you to start over, Rock’n Roll limiting the player to only three lives without any way to obtain more is absurd, as is the game having you play through 10-minute long levels that you'll have to start from scratch if something goes wrong.

How long is this game? Thirty two levels. 32 massive, puzzle-filled levels that you are only allowed to screw up on twice during your entire run through the game. Needless to say, that's pretty damn brutal. This was what nearly intimidated me into not covering the game. There’s a longplay of this game on Youtube that is three and a half hours long, and that’s how long it took to beat for someone who knew what they were doing and didn’t ever lose any lives. The thought of playing through three and a half hours of delicate, precise mouse motions, only to lose all progress right at the end due to a sudden game over? Terrifying.

Not helping matters is the fact that there's a bit of trial and error present in the game as well, with certain routes leading you down one-way tracks you may not be able to get back out of without the right items. Your limited field of view really doesn’t help with that either. It’s difficult to plan ahead when you can only see a distance of three tiles above or below your ball. This can be at least slightly mitigated by collecting the eyes scattered across every level. Every level has a map that you can bring up at any time by selecting the eye from your inventory, but how much detail is shown on that map is dependent on how many eyes you’ve collected throughout the whole game. Once you’ve collected 34 eyes the whole map will be visible. This helps a little, but the map is ultimately low resolution and hard to make out even with 34 eyes.

Fortunately, while the game is unforgiving for sure, it's not as unforgiving as I initially thought. For instance, while you can't gain extra lives, you can gain continues by purchasing continue rings from shops. These rings allow you to restart on the same level you died on with a fresh set of three lives, although that comes at the cost of your score and parachutes being reset to zero. They're rare and they're expensive (I think level 8 is the first time they show up, and I think they only show up in two more levels after that), but they greatly increase the room for error. Oh, they also respawn if you die and restart the level they're located in, so if you want to be cheap, there you go. You may have a harder time however as a result of your resources being reset.

Secondly, the game features warp points hidden throughout levels that allow you to skip ahead to later levels. This is essentially what the game uses in place of a more traditional password save, as how you activate these warps is told to you by hints you can purchase in the later levels. So once you get to level 24, you can find a hint that tells you about a warp in level 3 that will let you skip back to 24 instantly. It's an… odd way of doing it, not gonna lie. I would personally prefer a password save so I don't have to replay through the first four levels before I can get back to where I left off.

However, in my frequent replays of levels as a result of these strange systems, I actually ended up developing an appreciation for Rock ‘n Roll’s level design. Yes, they’re loaded with cheap beginner’s traps and drag on longer than they need to, but they actually also contain a surprising amount of depth and accommodation for different play styles. Levels in Rock ‘n Roll feel designed for three different play styles; survival, score attack and speedrunning. Obviously on your first playthrough of any level, you’ll be focused entirely on survival, finding as many coins as you can to stock up on as many resources as possible and figuring out the safest route to the exit you can forge with those items and power ups. If you’re going for a high score however, there’s a lot of extra secret rooms off the beaten path that reward you with diamonds. Playing this way is often more dangerous however. You may end up spending more resources in order to get those diamonds as they’re often behind locked doors or bottomless pits, which can potentially make the later parts of the level more difficult.

But, it’s when I just wanted to get through the levels as quickly as possible that I surprisingly ended up discovering the amazing replay value of Rock ‘n Roll. The game is very clearly designed for taking shortcuts, finding alternate routes and thinking outside the box in how you can use the tools at your disposal, and it’s immensely satisfying as a result. Often, if a shop gives you an item that seems useless during your first playthrough, there ends up being a more creative usage of it that you can use to speed through the level. Stuck at a locked door you don’t have the key for? Instead of backtracking to get that key, what if you saved some of the pickaxes you got earlier and used them to build a route around the door instead? Nearly every level in the game is filled with opportunities like this that are extremely satisfying to figure out. This is also encouraged by the game, as in addition to saving your high scores, Rock ‘n Roll also saves records of how quickly you manage to beat every individual level.

I also have a lot of appreciation for the variety and creativity present in Rock ‘n Roll’s level design. It feels like every level is exploring a new playful implementation of its base mechanics in a way that results in every level feeling distinct in spite of using the same tilesets. There’s puzzle-focused levels, more sprawling exploration-focused collect-a-thon levels, the occasional timed level focused on speedily navigating a more linear obstacle course, alongside a wide selection of levels exploring the possibilities of all the different items and power-ups available. Of note, I enjoyed Level 10: Try the Tree for being one of the most non-linear levels in the game while still being designed for speed with the usage of teleporters taking you back to the central area of the level whenever you reach a dead end. Level 15: Fragile Action is broken up into smaller puzzle rooms which reward you with keys to access more puzzle rooms, including mazes of crumbling tiles and automatically opening and closing doors, with one room requiring you to figure out a route to safely destroy every crumbling tile safely in order to spawn in a key. Following that up, Level 16: Air Fortress has a fun theme to it, with the entire level being shaped like an airplane, but also has its own share of creative ideas such as a section requiring you to get around a u-turn covered in ice tiles right next to a fan, which is a fun small physics puzzle. Level 30: Rollercoaster started out intimidating, but ended up actually being a lot of fun thanks to how fast-paced it is, being based primarily around arrow tiles taking you along a winding path with various hazards to swerve around along the way.

Some levels do just suck however. Level 28: Think Twice sticks out as probably the most frustrating, being an entire level based around trying to trick you into unwinnable situations repeatedly. It's not a short level either, you will have plenty of chances to screw up. Hit that switch too early? Congrats, you're stuck now because it caused the doorway behind you to close shut. In terms of being more tedious than frustrating, Level 22: Riddle Rooms has an excellent premise behind it where you use teleporters to enter small puzzle rooms that award you with a pickaxe upon solving, of which you need to find three in order to build a bridge to the exit, but it’s let down by the amount of tedious backtracking the level requires, constantly having you return to the start of the level to pick up more red keys to unlock more puzzle rooms due to each room being locked off by nine red doors, and you can only hold a maximum of nine red keys at once.

My least favourite however is the secret Level 33. I found this by accident immediately upon first starting the game when I was still trying to figure out how the pickaxes work. Level 33 is accessed by a secret warp in Level 1, and upon completing Level 33 you are warped back to Level 2 to continue the game as normal. Okay, so a completely optional level, what’s the issue? Well, the level contains four parachute shops right at the start, alongside all of the coins you need to purchase them. This is extremely valuable and too good to pass up. After all, these are the closest things to extra lives that you can get, and the game sending you back to Level 2 after completing Level 33 means that you can still access the warps to the later levels as well. The only problem is that the level is uh, boring. It’s nothing but a long, winding, linear corridor with no branching paths and minimal hazards that drags on for three whole minutes. This was the part I always dreaded any time I had to restart after a game over, not because it’s hard, but because it’s so dull.

In general, many of the more obnoxious levels are just needlessly padded. A common occurrence is having a linear hallway without any hazards that leads to a dead end with a key at the end, which unlocks a door right next to the entrance of the hallway you just went down. The locked door doesn’t really add anything in that case other than wasted time. The key wasn’t hard to find nor was the route to it challenging in any way. Of course, since sequence breaking is a large part of Rock ‘n Roll’s level design, many of these time wasters can be skipped with some creative item usage, but that of course doesn’t apply to every instance of this kind of design.

I do ultimately think for most people, Rock ‘n Roll will be more enjoyable with a trainer to give you infinite continues. The game would still be challenging even with that extra help, as you’d still have to restart levels if you mess up a puzzle or run out of lives. Furthermore, I think the game could also benefit from a level select, not just for making the game more forgiving, but also because it would allow you to more easily practice and speedrun individual levels. Given that the game already has a save feature for high scores and records, unlocking a time attack mode for any level you’ve already beaten could be a lot of fun.

In spite of everything, I did really enjoy Rock ‘n Roll and consider it a new Amiga personal favourite, but I’m also aware that much of it will be a tough sell for others. If you’re willing to put the effort in, you’ve got a game with excellent controls, a ton of content, lots of replay value and level design that, well, manages to be equally fantastic and terrible all at once. I’m going to let the fact I’m still considering attempting to one-credit clear this game warpless at some point speak for itself, even though there’s so little room for error. With a few tweaks, I think Rock ‘n Roll could be easily worked into something timeless. Maybe someday we’ll see a fan remake that allows Rock ‘n Roll to hit its full potential? Only time will tell.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 13th December 2025