Pawn : The

Copyright : Rainbird | Reviewed by : Ritchardo

Set in the mythical world of Kerovnia, your objectives are manyfold: The simplest is to escape from Kerovnia, but you will find others as you wander about the land and communicate with the characters you meet.

The Pawn combines a rich text adventure with stunning colour graphics and a language parser what will set the standards for years to come.

Graphics

Nicely rendered rendered pics accompany a number of the locations and they slide down over the text description of a location before scrolling back up, off the screen after a short period of time. A quick swatch at the back of the game packaging shows the Atari ST version of the screenshots, a quick comparison underlines the amount of skilled programming on show to cram the game into the CPC. Close examination of the pictures can often lead to some vital clues for the rest of the game, a daring approach and one that can only work with the high quality pictures that are on show here.

Sound

Words like violence, break the silence as Depeche Mode once sang. You can put it on a CD player while you play the game if you want because you wont miss any sounds from this game. It?s a text adventure. No sound. Bit of a given really!

Gameplay

Text adventures live and die by the quality of gameplay, more so than any other genre. For all the flashy exterior and high res graphics, it doesn?t matter a jot if the story is rubbish or the parser is user-unfriendly. Thankfully, The Pawn marks a high benchmark in CPC text adventures.

A real rival to the Infocom range, The Pawn offers a truly immersive playing experience with a nice blend of wit and traditional adventuring aspects. It?s rare that a game can cocoon you completely in another world but The Pawn does an admirable job thanks to its intelligent parser that is both complex enough to understand your inputs and user-friendly enough to prompt you in the right direction if you haven?t entered the right command.

The characters you encounter on your travels are rich and varied in intelligence and motive, a fantastic reflection of reality! It is easy to become involved in fully fleshed conversations with some characters that although are mostly pointless, does add a sense of realism to proceedings. Granted, their responses are limited but it is possible to engage each and everyone in a different conversation, sometimes with extremely amusing results.

The only downside to all this clever jiggery pokery is that the game does take slightly longer than most text adventures to respond to user inputs but it?s a small price to pay for a top quality game.

A landmark text adventure, The Pawn marked the first (and in my opinion, only) real challenge to Infocom?s reign supreme of interactive fiction. If you like text adventures, you?ll love this.