Commodore 64 horror adventure Evil Spirit hits the Protovision shop

German retro publisher Protovision has added the first-person graphic horror adventure Evil Spirit to its online Commodore 64 storefront. The game isn't a brand-new release, having originally launched in April 2026 as a free digital download on itch.io alongside physical boxed editions on 5.25-inch floppy disk and cartridge from fellow German publisher poly.play.

Created by programmer and artist Friedrich Volmering under the Windigo Productions banner, the game includes a SID soundtrack composed by Jörg "Eiswuxe" Winterstein. It runs on both PAL and NTSC systems, supports English and German text, and works on original 1982 hardware as well as modern emulators like VICE.

Submachine guns and 150 rooms

The setup wastes very little time on exposition. A boring road trip through the countryside ends in a wreck near an isolated mountain where an ancient evil has broken loose, leaving you stranded next to a dead car with hostile creatures closing in. From there, the story plays out across four chapters and more than 150 first-person locations.

Most first-person adventures on the Commodore 64 rely on sluggish text parsers or purely turn-based encounters, so the shift to real-time tactical combat here is an ambitious change of pace for an 8-bit machine. You'll scavenge more than 70 items to solve environmental puzzles and fend off up to three simultaneous monsters, managing your distance and choosing between melee weapons and firearms like submachine guns.

Everything runs off a joystick-driven menu interface rather than the keyboard. Room-to-room movement within each chapter avoids separate loading screens, and there's a built-in save option so you don't have to finish all four chapters in a single sitting. I'm curious how readable the distance management stays when three enemies crowd the viewport at once, given how cramped first-person combat on the C64 usually feels.

A busy few years for Windigo

Volmering founded Windigo Productions in 2022, and the solo studio has kept up an almost absurd release pace for a one-person homebrew operation. Before tackling survival horror in 2026, Windigo put out dungeon crawlers and strategy titles for the C64 and MS-DOS, including Deathflood: Dungeon of Doom and Devolution: Global Warming in 2023, followed by Battle for Cronos, The Kaufmannsgilde, and Shipwrecked over the next two years.

Having the game show up in Protovision's catalog makes it much easier to grab alongside other modern C64 releases. Founded in 1996, Protovision is one of the longest-running publishers still supporting Commodore's 8-bit hardware, producing its own heavy hitters like Sam's Journey and Briley Witch Chronicles while stocking boxed releases from partner labels like poly.play.