THE PAWN

CPC version, AMTIX!, issue 18 (April 1987), p.48-49 - reviewed by Rob Steel

Rainbird/Magnetic Scrolls, £19.95 disk

The Pawn places the player in the mythical land of Kerovnia, with the sole objective of making his escape. However, before doing so, there is much to do and lots to see. The complex text handling system allows deep and meaningful interaction with other characters and/or objects encountered, to the extent that peripheral tasks soon become prevalent. To quote the press release sent to me by Clare Edgeley of Rainbird, "All characters and objects are represented as if they existed in a real world, storing complex information about their attributes and properties linked to their particular position or context in the game." I'll go along with that.

The CPC6128 program has all of the features contained in other versions: Sophisticated Parser, Word Processor style Line Editor, option to Save a Game Position to Disk and Graphics On/Off Toggle. The only difference that I can see is that the graphics displayed scroll up off the screen when data is needed from the disk. This (I am told!) is because the graphics are in a different screen mode to the text, and there is insufficient processor power to show the picture and access the disk drive at the same time. This is no big deal, and it does not detract from the gameplay at all.

I think that by now, every adventure reviewer in the United Kingdom has raved about The Pawn. There is not much to add to what has already been said, the story and some of the puzzles will probably be known to you, especially if you read the February issue of AMTIX!

The CPC6128 version of The Pawn is excellent, although the text did seem a little blurred to me, but then the eyes are not what they used to be... the middle one is very weak!

Save up your pennies and buy The Pawn, it's probably the finest adventure to have been released to date.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a short-sighted dragon to deal with...