Adventure games

Background

I hadn't noticed this game until the English translation was released and announced on the Spectrum Computing forums. It's another DAAD authored game that happily has been ported to the ZX Spectrum.

Just to clarify, this game comes in two parts. Although they're separate games, you need to play both to reach the conclusion of the mystery. This article describes my playthough of both parts.

As always, I've tried to avoid spoilers but some screenshots may give a hint of what's to come in the game. Though I guess if you were worried about knowing anything you probably wouldn't be reading this. Anyway, onto the game.

The game

In this game you play a priest called Muha Dicramba, part of a monastic order who worship a goddess called Gess Sorthruul. The game starts with a cinematic style prelude where you start as the child version of Muha, before the game throws you into the main story as a slightly-more-grown-up Muha.

Shortly afterwards you're informed about your purpose in this adventure - you're tasked with solving the murder of a trader, by name of Thalza Madi, found dead in his mansion.

Poor downtrodden Muha has an additional challenge - he has the voice of Gess Sorthruul in his head, constantly talking to him. Based on Gess' derisive and sarcastic chatter we can conclude their goddess is a right... errr.. 'bad-girl'. And a highly entertaining one at that.

Over the course of his investigation, Muha will find old prayer tablets that he can use to request help from Gess Sorhruul, such as VISION (lets him spot things that he wouldn't normally) and SHADOW (makes him less visible to others). A bit like a priest version of magic spells, I suppose.

As you proceed with the game, you learn things by talking to people, and find clues and evidence, occasionally making use of your prayer tablets. Once you've gathered enough evidence, the story will naturally progress to another phase of the investigation.

The map is quite small but as the story progresses things change slightly when things move from day to night. Part one concludes with a fairly gripping cliffhanger and you'll be thirsting to start part 2, like you do with those Netflix series, or crack cocaine (probably).

The story progresses quickly; the map is small and vocab and puzzles are mostly straightforward. I only got stuck on two occasions.

• The first was resolved by trawling the map and performing a thorough EXAMining of things (you can EXAMINE pretty much everything, but I'd missed something).
• The second was a small synonym anomaly (a result of the translation from Spanish) which meant I was using the wrong word. I resolved this thanks to EJVG himself, but in case anyone is similarly stuck it might help to know (hint) THE COOK IS A WOMAN.

It took me a few evenings (plus that intervention from EJVG) to solve both parts of the mystery. You never end up with a particularly large inventory, and only usually have a couple of prayer tablets to use, so there aren't that many item/puzzle combinations.

Without too much spoilering, completion of part 2 hints at a potential further adventure, though we'll have to see if it's a continuation or a new story...

Summary

The author's itch.io page credits tranlators, correctors and testers for this game (apologies for not listing everyone involved but you can go there and look!). And I must say the effort has certainly paid off. The story is immediately gripping, and the blend of dreamlike story, mystery and Muha's thoughts, combined with Gess's pithy interjections, make this an entertaining game to play.

None of the classic 'adventure game sins' are present - so no dead ends, deaths, mazes or obscure vocab. Also you won't have to make a map. The author clearly wanted players to complete the story, and it's not too difficult, even for the unseasoned adventurer. I did wonder when I first saw the screenshots whether this would be a 'style over substance' game; nice presentation but not much to the game. Gladly this was absolutely not the case.

So yep, you might have guessed that I really liked this one. Massive thanks to Eduardo-and-team for releasing an English translation version of the game. I really enjoyed it and loved the story.

I've said it before, but only a small-ish proportion of newly released Speccy games seem to be adventures, so it's nice when they are very well written, like this one. I'll be keeping an eye out for season two..!