The Pawn

The Pawn by British studio Magnetic Scrolls belonged to the first wave of text adventures that combined a rich text parser with static illustrated graphics accompanying each location, an unusual and highly regarded approach in the mid-1980s. The player finds themselves in the fantasy land of Kerovnia, where, as a stranger without a past, they must gradually work out who they are and what task they must accomplish, with the main tools remaining typing commands in fairly natural language, carefully examining the surroundings, and conversing with characters who react differently to the player's words.

On the Amiga, the game excelled with a sophisticated text parser able to understand more complex and longer sentences than many rival titles, and with colorful illustrations that, in many versions of the platform, ranked among the visually best in the entire text-game genre. The puzzles often required unconventional thinking, patient experimentation with items, and attentiveness to details in room descriptions, which was typical for text adventures of the time, but The Pawn brought this to an especially well thought-out and fair level, without pointless dead ends or unfair deaths without warning.

The Pawn helped establish Magnetic Scrolls as one of the leading European studios in the text-adventure genre, and on the Amiga it became one of the reasons the platform earned a reputation as a machine also suited to more demanding, text-oriented players looking for something other than action. The game also showed that the European text-game scene could compete with American titles from Infocom, both in the quality of its parser and in the inventiveness of the world it placed the player in. Today it is interesting mainly as an example of how far a purely text-based parser combined with supporting graphics could be taken before the arrival of full-fledged point-and-click adventures.

Why play: For lovers of text adventures, The Pawn shows how far a parser supported by graphics could be taken, and proves that the European scene could compete with America's Infocom.