Pawn, The

Wow! When screenshots of this game started appearing in magazines back in 1985, it felt like we were entering a new stage of game development. This thing was a pure work of art.

This game is so great, I'm making up a word to describe it. Squesqeustweigiiesquaw. That is all.

Surreal, confusing, yet very rewarding IF game. Never got very far!

I understand that this game has a lot of fans, but I would like to point out that it is in fact about landscape-painting. This was the first (and perhaps best) exercise in 8bit landscape-painting, and for this reason it's a classic.

I love this game.

Who else got to the ancient wise hermit guy and typed "Kill Hermit" or whatever, and had him scissor kick you into a coma?

I know I did!

Wow. Wow wow. I was always a fan of the brilliant Infocom text adventures and was disappointed by every graphic adventure I ever played, until I played The Pawn. Great parser, breathtaking graphics and the story was clever too. The truth is that The Pawn sort of runined pure text adventures for me. I still enjoyed them but I missed the excitement that came from waiting for the next graphic. Luckily Magnetic Scrolls (what a cool name!) wasn't a one trick pony. It's pretty straightfoward, if you like adventures, you must play The Pawn.

Magnetic Scrolls only made brilliant game, this is maybe the very best!

Hmm, this was one of the first adventure games I finished, and unlike Paul, I was *really* disappointed with the ending.
The graphics were perfect for their age, tho.

Never played this as adventures arn't really my thing, although the graphics do look rather good.

The Magnetic Scrolls games were always a mixed bag. True, the graphics were very nice and the parser very clever, but the actual adventures/stories themselves never really gripped me the way the Infocom titles did. The Infocom stories truly did feel like works of interactive fiction, but the Magnetic Scrolls games clung too tightly to traditional text adventures, where puzzles took precedence over plot and characterisation. Older text adventures were naturally restricted by the capabilities of the machines they ran on, but Magnetic Scrolls didn't have that excuse. The Pawn is initially intriguing, but soon shows us the limitations of Magnetic Scrolls' scope and vision. Switch into text-only mode and you could easily be playing an early Level 9 title. Things improved a bit with The Guild of Thieves and Corruption, where MS seemed to be making more of an effort, but Jinxter (irritatingly twee) and Fish (Tass Times in Tone Town did it better) saw the trend slip once again.

So utterly good it looks and so utterly good it is as an adventure. Big, massive and fantastic fun.

UGH. I was psyched when I bought this back in the day - and it was neat to play but I never got very far. I never got past that first little area. These text-adventure types were just wayyy to particular back then. If you didn't have the EXACT phrase to do something, you were screwed. I give it a 3.

One of the few adventures with some humour in it.

Good parser, and a good port.

Being a text-adventure, it played every bit as good as the Amiga version, and the graphics weren't bad either.

A must have or all adventure players.

Might have actually been good if it weren't for the horrible copy protection which crashed (my 100% legal copy) early into the game every time.

The first adventure from Magnetic Scrolls, highly appraised for it's parser and beautiful graphics. You find yourself in a strange world where you'll encounter characters like Kronos, a laughing hermit, a snowman, a dragon and even another adventurer riding on a horse on his way to rescue a princess in distress - You'll have to hurry to complete certain tasks before him or somehow stop him from reaching his goal before you can. A very good adventures with a large game-world!