Hazard

How to Play

Notes:

• The installer of the game is 16-bit, so it doesn't work on modern systems, you will need to use tools like winevdm to install the game
• Uninst.exe on the disc of English version showed many generic warnings on VirusTotal scan, _ hazard.ex_ also showed few generic warnings, but all installation files on the disc are clear, here's the scan report
• It is possible to run the game on modern systems as it is, but it will work very slow and/or have many visual glitches. The best way to play the game on modern systems is to use Virtual Machine with old Windows, like Windows 95 or 98
• You may accidentally "soft-lock" the progress, because the game has many bugs. There's critical bugs in two places in the game, this is what you should to do to bypass them:

1. If you feel that you stuck right after the first village, talk to every NPC separately. Talk with all the NPCs because the villagers say different things depending on which playable character you use to interact with them
2. Be sure to make savegames in several slots before entering the snowy area at the North of the global map. Right after you enter the location, an avalanche will fall behind you, and you won't be able to leave the area. After that, you MUST do the following things in the town: find an NPC whom you can ask about the exit -> go to two screens to the West of town and search the trees blocking the exit -> return and find an NPC who can recommend a woodcutter that can clear the exit -> find the green-skinned woodcutter in one of the houses (he promises to help if you bring him a quest item from the dungeon to the East). If you go directly to the dungeon without doing all that steps, the boss won't drop the required item and you'll have to start the game from the very beginning

German version Disc image + Full install

I ripped the game and installed it in 86box, then extracted the game from the virtual hard drive and got it running on Win 11 with dgVoodoo2. The CD must be mounted.

NoCD

Retrogamer Akai Tsuki delivered a NoCD, it has mild VirusTotal flags linked fo the original EXE:

The original binary is packed with an old pre-v1.0 version of UPX that can't be unpacked normally, which is probably what the heuristics are kicking in over.

For the truly paranoid, you can hold down the keys F, U, C, K while starting the game, and it will skip the cd check, works on completely unmodified game. It gave me a good laugh when I discovered that.