Excalibur: Sword of Kings

I played this as I was following along on the tutorial for how to create Text Adventure Games using Adventuron. It is very short and the puzzles are rather straightforward an on the nose. But the writing is good and the atmosphere is great. I recommend a play-through as it is very short and gives a glimpse into the old ZX Spectrum days.

This is an extremely short and simple text adventure that you can play online in an authorized remake at adventuron.itch.io (which is why I tried it). I'm not saying it's not worth the 10-15 minutes it takes to complete it, but I don't think you'll remember you played it 10 minutes after that.

The manual has the back story. While the knights and Merlin were away from Camelot searching for the Holy Grail, a evil "she-wizard" (the manual's word, not mine) called Crania managed to steal Arthur's sword and trap him in a nightmare. Now, it's up to you to journey to Camelot, defeat Crania, and wake Arthur from his magic slumber.

One reason why I tell you the plot here is that the manual includes a list of words recognized by the game, and spoil the final puzzle in it. Not that any of the puzzles require much out of the box thinking. Honestly, you can probably complete this game by typing fewer words than I used to write this review. At least the Spectrum colors are fun and jazzy.