The Pawn
Magnetic Scrolls released The Pawn for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1986. The Pawn is graphics adventure game set in the mythical world of Kerovnia. The Pawn employs a complex language parser (text input commands) accompanied by painterly graphics-illustrations.
The Pawn was followed up by The Guild of Thieves of 1987.
The Pawn consists of exploration, finding items, reading descriptions and communicating with characters. The object of The Pawn is to escape Kerovnia.
The player explores the Kerovnian countryside by inputting directional movements relating to the eight points of the compass. The player can type full words (Northeast) or abbreviations (NE).
There are various movement (NE), action (go, get, look), conversational [ask, say] and special commands [inventory]. In addition to basic verb-noun commands The Pawn's parser can interpret fairly complex sentences containing multiple commands.
In addition, The Pawn parser can translate ciphers into English-language hints, of which there are three "tiers" that depend on the player's score. The Pawn employs speech synthesis that reads aloud the displayed text, which can be displayed in two sizes and can be printed out.
The Pawn was written by Robert Steggles and programmed in M68K assembly by Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers. The Pawn's graphics were drawn by Geoff Quilley, and its four minutes of digitized music was composed by John Molloy for 4-channel Paula.
The Pawn displays in 16-color 320x200. The Pawn employs the Amiga's hardware cursor for smooth mouse-cursor movement when navigating drop-down menus. In 1986 smooth mouse-cursor movement in computer games was uncommon. The graphics-window scrolls when illustrations change.
The illustrations are just recolored digitized stills; there is no animation whatsoever. And there are no environmental sound effects. In this respect, Defender of the Crown of 1986 did much more.
The Pawn was distributed on 1x 3.5" 880kB diskette and can be manually installed to hard disk drive and run via CLI/Shell.
The Pawn manual: 55 pages.
The Pawn copy protection: enter a specific word from "A Tale of Kerovnia."
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