8K Adventure

In Dunric’s 8k Adventure, prolific (fringe?) IF designer Paul Allen Panks endeavors to cram a fantasy text adventure into fewer than 170 lines of BASIC code. I can’t comment on the writing in this game because there isn’t any. In very-old-school fashion (many Scott Adams titles would seem lush by comparison), the game’s 25 locations are sparsely implemented, barely described, and mostly empty ... but moving around and mapping the tiny world provided me with a genuine, if brief, sense of exploration, and the game’s few details are well-chosen to evoke a basic, unassuming trad-fantasy atmosphere. In my own imagination, these simple details took on lives of their own, and without prose to manhandle my mind’s eye, I still saw (for example) the game's forest cottage with clarity, and paused to wonder who might live there. This world isn’t much, but the arrangement is easy to explore and map, and the spare setting taps neatly into the cultural common ground of stock-fantasy imagery.

8k Adventure offers only an unadorned, skeletal game design: simple exploration, a few hit-point-chewing fight sequences, and a very basic puzzle structure of find-the-item-that-lets-you-move-onward. It is both easy and forgiving. If you've felt weighed down by prose-heavy works, this bare-bones game, unencumbered by meat or sauce, might lighten your palate pleasantly. Skeletal it may be, but dem bones (dem bones) gonna walk around.

Tiny, slight, fast, and easy: 8k Adventure makes only the humblest of promises … but it keeps them.

This game should be played with a C64 emulator, then it is a very short and primitive but charming two-word parser game in the style of early 80s single load text adventures. The use of colors on C64 add to the charm so if you play the TADS port I think you can at least subtract one more star, so the TADS version is not really recommended.

There hardly is any story: "An important scepter has gone missing from the royal throne."

You simply have to find the scepter. There are a bit of randomized combat which is not everyone's cup of tea but works okay and your chances of winning has to do with the weapons you have and armour.

You don't have to solve all puzzles to complete the game and it can be completed in around 40 turns so it is very short. But if you enjoy small, primitive two-word parser games, this is an okay game for a short while.