Bought a new text adventure with pictures for the Commodore 64: Kingdom of the Seven Stones. It comes as a cartridge release from The future was 8 bit.

The cartridge has a simple label and doesn’t look as fancy as the recent A Pig Quest or the older games on cartridge that I have, like Torreoscura and Boxymoxy. It is nicely purple though.

The cartridge comes in a little sleeve that has a picture of an ominous castle on the front. That picture reminds me of other boxart on other games. I’ll have to look into where I saw it before. Surrounding the picture is the familiar blue and grey theme like on the old Commodore cartridge releases.

On booting up the game, I’m greeted with the picture of the ominous castle on the screen over which is plastered the title of the game in an atrocious font, accompanied by a nice little tune. Underneath the heavily compressed picture is the text in excellent Old English welcoming me to the Kingdom of the Seven Stones. I immediately wonder how important those stones must be to name a kingdom after them. And how big are they? Are they huge boulders, or maybe tiny, but very shiny little stones? Such a mystery!

After the intro, you are left to your own devices. So the first thing I did was type for some help. The game informed me about the usual commands, like north, get, drop, talk, look, use, etcetera. So the second thing I did was type “north”, which prompted the following response “thou canst go north”. And while that is good to know, now I’m left wondering how to venture in the wished for direction. After trying “go north”, which got me the same response, I’m left stuck at the very beginning of the game! Who would have thought.

The lack of any physical explanation with this release is disappointing, especially considering the price of this release. A simple booklet would have upped the value to the expected level and would have helped with the explanation and the exposition of the game.

Other minor niggles that I have is that there is an annoying line between the picture and the text that is flickering a little bit. Another thing is that the “–More–” label is displayed over the text, which makes it hard to read. And the game runs kind of slow, so I hope that I won’t have to do the same things over and over.

I’m off to watch a YouTube walkthrough to learn how to progress in this game. It must be something simple. After that I’m sure I will enjoy the game if the writing in the “help” mode is an indication of the rest of the game. And I always love to embark on journeys of epic proportions!