The Pawn

The Pawn by Magnetic Scrolls was released in 1986 and brought one of the technically most advanced text adventures of its time to the ZX Spectrum. The game places the player in the fantasy kingdom of Kerovnia, which the character reaches through a mysterious gate, with the task of finding the way back home. The journey leads through varied locations full of puzzles, strange characters, and the black humor for which Magnetic Scrolls was renowned, which set the game apart from more serious contemporary text adventures focused purely on logic and puzzle elements. The game's text also regularly commented on the player's failures with ironic detachment, which eased the frustration of repeated deaths.

The game's key strength was its advanced text parser, which handled complex sentences, pronouns, and the context of previous commands much better than the competition, allowing for more natural communication with the game world and less frustration from misunderstood commands, a problem that plagued many period text adventures with terse parsers. The Spectrum version also included digitized illustrations accompanying individual locations, which was above standard for an eight-bit machine and gave the game a visual quality comparable to more powerful contemporary platforms such as the Commodore 64 or Amiga.

The Pawn was received by contemporary reviewers as one of the most elaborate text adventures to appear on the Spectrum, and it helped launch the successful series of Magnetic Scrolls games as well as the Rainbird label under which it was published. For the text adventure genre, it marked a shift in the quality of both parser and storytelling and inspired numerous other creators who tried to emulate a similar degree of sophistication in their own games. Even today it is appreciated by genre fans for its ingenious puzzles and distinctive humor, though it requires patience with the classic text-based controls, without modern conveniences such as an automatic map or hints built directly into the game.

Why play it: For fans of text adventures who will appreciate the ingenious puzzles and distinctive humor of one of the genre's most elaborate games, which launched both the Magnetic Scrolls series and the Rainbird label.