I’m deeply disappointed in Sky Twice for Commodore 64. Not because it failed to meet my lofty expectations – oh no – but because it dared to exceed my lowly, gutter-level expectations.

Sky Twice is supposed to be a dumpster fire of agony. Zzap magazine bestowed upon it their lowest score ever – a brutal 7% rating, branding it the C64’s definitive face plant. The worst game. The end. Done. History.

But I disagree. Sky Twice is terrible, yes. But the worst? Oh, cupcake, the C64 library is a haunted graveyard of disasters that make this game look like a semi-functional treasure. Every time I try the C64, I stumble upon titles that make Sky Twice seem like it belongs in the Louvre.

Let’s break this down. Sky Twice is an auto-scrolling run-and-gun platformer – a genre that already invites pain due to the precision required. Add in controls that feel like a they’re a punishment for shoplifting, and you got a recipe for rage quits.

The problem is that the hit box is terrible. Get anywhere close to an enemy, you die. Move just a little towards a pit, you fall even though you’re not in the pit. And jumping requires getting the angle of your joystick just right – in the C64 era, jumping was done by pushing up – and you better arc it correctly or else you’ll unintentionally fall into a pit. Which means a big part of jumping with Sky Twice is moving back then diagonally right with your joystick.

It’s also obvious that Sky Twice leans heavily on being difficult because it’s short. If you nail the jumping, it’s over in seven minutes.

But as awful as it is, Sky Twice is still not the worst game ever. In fact, parts of it are… dare I say… decent? Shocking, I know.

The graphics, for one, are much better than half the catalogue of the C64’s blurry-but-simple pixels. The backgrounds are coloured and varied, the sprites are details. And honestly? It looks like it had a budget of more than “a sandwich and a handshake”.

The music? It slaps. Zzap had the audacity to call it “mediocre” and “repetitive”, but I’m not sure what they were smoking. Each stage has its own tune – a rare feat for that era – and it’s better than most C64 soundtracks that looped like a sad, dying Roomba. Some C64 games didn’t even have music! Sky Twice has an ending chiptune so good, it’s practically an apology for the rest of the game.

The controls are horrible – especially on the C64’s typical one button joystick. But there’s two ways of improving this experience. First, use a joystick with a second button, where the joystick’s “Up” movement can be mapped to that second button. And once you map the controls to a mechanical keyboard, suddenly it’s like playing a different game. A playable one even. Sure, it’s short and frustrating, but at least you’re not fighting the hardware and the software.

Sky Twice actually rewards you for finishing it. There’s a real ending. An animated cutscene with a final satisfying chiptune. On most C64 games, you were lucky if you got an ending at all. You finish Sky Twice, and at least you feel like you accomplished something – like surviving through a Saw movie.

Plus, let’s give Måns Näsman, the Swedish teenager who coded this game, his flowers. He made this on a C64 in the ‘80s – probably while trying to pass algebra. Sure, it’s bad, but is it as bad as The A-Team, a game so hideous it makes Medusa scream? Or Luna Landa, where you die for the crime of merely existing? Sky Twice, by comparison, looks like a Michelangelo fresco.

So, no, I don’t recommend Sky Twice. But I also can’t let its reputation as “the worst C64 game ever” slide. It’s not. It’s aspirationally bad but not quite the nadir. There are plenty of other C64 games rotting at the bottom of the barrel. Sky Twice? It’s somewhere just above them, clinging to the edges, probably humming its surprisingly decent soundtrack.