The Guild of Thieves

The Guild of Thieves, released in 1987, built on the success of The Pawn and was again created by Magnetic Scrolls as a text adventure with rich graphical trimmings for the ZX Spectrum. In it, the player becomes a fledgling thief trying to gain entry into the prestigious thieves' guild in the city of Kerovnia, and to that end must burgle a number of ingeniously guarded buildings, evade traps and guards, and solve dozens of interconnected puzzles whose solutions are often unlocked only in another, seemingly unrelated location.

The game built on the same advanced parser as its predecessor but also pushed puzzle design further, often requiring the combination of items, careful reading of environment descriptions, and experimentation with unusual uses of things. Humor was again an integral part of the experience; the text descriptions were written with exaggeration and numerous witty details that lightened the otherwise demanding puzzle elements and gave the game a distinctive tone, so it didn't feel like a mere repeat of a proven formula. The graphical illustrations accompanying the locations were among the best to appear in text games on the Spectrum, and significantly enriched the atmosphere of each place.

Reviews praised the game for its balance between difficulty and puzzle fairness, a problem that afflicted some older text adventures with unclear progression logic. The Guild of Thieves became one of Magnetic Scrolls' commercially most successful titles and cemented the studio's reputation as a leader in the genre of English text adventures of the second half of the 1980s, at a time when competition among text adventures on the Spectrum was already noticeably fading. Today it is valued by genre fans as a demonstration of how mature a text parser and its storytelling could be on an eight-bit machine, and it is often ranked alongside its predecessor among the pinnacles of Magnetic Scrolls' work and of the entire genre of English-language text adventures from the second half of the 1980s.

Why play it: For fans of text adventures who will appreciate well-thought-out, fair puzzles without frustrating progression logic – one of the pinnacles of Magnetic Scrolls' work and of the whole genre.