Play Amazon Trail Online

Game Overview

Amazon Trail is one of those weirdly specific '90s edutainment games that somehow sticks with you. You start off in this dream where a ghostly jaguar tells you the Inca are in trouble—malaria, colonizers, the usual—and suddenly you're paddling a canoe down the Amazon in 1993. Or 1600. Or whenever, because the game keeps tossing you through time via these weird blue fog transitions.

You pick between two guides (I always went with Antonio—his supply kit had better harpoons), and then it's this mix of Oregon Trail-style resource management and bizarrely detailed nature trivia. Half the game is trying not to flip your canoe on whirlpools while the other half involves photographing capybaras and arguing with 16th-century Portuguese traders about whether electric eels are edible (they're not, trust me).

The time jumps are the best part—one minute you're bartering with Teddy Roosevelt about rubber plantations, the next you're getting side-eyed by conquistadors. By the end, you're graded on how many fish you correctly identified (why was there a quiz??) and get a fancy gem-covered shield. It's janky, weirdly hard, and I definitely capsized more times than I'd like to admit. Still kinda love it though.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".