Guild of Thieves

Guild of Thieves followed up on the success of The Pawn in 1987 and became one of the most acclaimed text adventures from Magnetic Scrolls on the Commodore 64. The player travels to an island called Kingdom to become a member of a prestigious thieves' guild, which requires completing a series of daring heists and convincingly proving their skill, ingenuity, and capacity for logical reasoning within an elaborate, interconnected world full of layered puzzles.

The game builds on the same advanced text parser as its predecessor, refined even further this time, and offers a more open structure where many tasks can be solved in different orders or even in several different ways depending on the player's preference. The puzzle design is renowned for its elegance—solutions often require attentiveness to small details in the environment descriptions rather than randomly trying commands. On the Commodore 64, the text was accompanied by high-quality illustrations of key locations, which visually set the game apart from starker American competitors and gave it a distinctive fantasy-adventure atmosphere with a touch of humor.

Guild of Thieves was received very favorably by contemporary critics and is often ranked among the very pinnacles of British text adventures of the 1980s, frequently rated even higher than The Pawn itself. Together with other titles from Magnetic Scrolls, it proved that the text adventure genre still had room to grow even after the rise of graphical adventures from rival studios, thanks to witty writing, a well-thought-out world, and puzzles built on logic rather than guessing the right verb. At the same time, the game doesn't take itself too seriously and approaches the adventure with a generous dose of exaggeration, giving it a distinctive, easily recognizable character. Today's player will appreciate the ingenuity of the puzzles and the dense atmosphere, though navigating the world without available hints can be fairly demanding for an unaccustomed player.

Why play it: For ingenious, logic-based puzzles and an atmosphere full of English humor, ideal for players who don't mind drawing a map on paper and thinking hard about every command.