A new Text Adventure for the ZX Spectrum
A little while back I was searching eBay for some good Text Adventures I hadn't yet played on the speccy and came across two unusual tapes I'd never seen before, All Hallows Eve and Iron Wolves. I was intrigued.
After some digging I found that they came from a small company known as Cronosoft. A little more digging unearthed their site, which holds many gorgeous games, all of which are brand new!
All Hallows Eve seems to have started as an C project, released onto Itch.io by the developers, Mancave Software. The developer is still actively supporting the itch page and discussing fixes and updates with people who head by the page to play the game.
The spectrum port comes on a gorgeously made green tape in a lovely clear tape case with a professionally printed inlay. The inlay has precious little information, and the in-game help is similarly minimalist. You're supposed to just work it out for yourself.
The game starts at the image on the cover: You're outside a spooky mansion and you need to find some evidence of what happened to some children and escape the manor before the clock strikes 12.
The game proceeds very quickly, all of the puzzles are very easy to work through. There are a few insta-kill screens by doing the wrong thing. You just need to blunder into them, and then remember not to do that again. Working your way through the game's 35-or-so locations is an enjoyable little distraction, everything works the way you think it should, and the logic is relatively straight-forward.
The primary goal of the exercise seems to have been a proof-of-concept that the developer could write a text adventure. No ground is really broken here, as all of the puzzles are extremely straightforward. The game has no graphics, other than the title, and the parser is very rudimentary, limited to verb-noun only.
Because the parser is so limited, there are several points where you are left struggling to find the right verb to use. Sometimes it comes quickly, sometimes the verb is less-than-obvious. Luckily the itch page has a walkthrough in the commentary below, and if you take a quick glance you can see that the complete solution is very short.
It's wonderful to see new ZX Spectrum games being made, and I really hope that Mancave refine their methods, create a larger, more sophisticated text adventure, and perhaps try to push some boundaries. We've had 30 years to perfect image compression and huffman text-encoding. Surely a few images and a few more locations can be squeezed in?
Originally, a budget ZX Spectrum text adventure may have been £1.99. In today's money that's about a fiver. On Cronosoft's website you can pick All Hallows Eve 1881 up for £6, so the price is pretty much bang-on the budget pricing you'd expect.
Graphics: Puzzles: Length: Atmosphere: Presentation: (can't beat a physical tape!!)
Overall: 2.5/5
Verdict: It's lovely to see text adventures still being made for the ZX Spectrum but All Hallows Eve could have been so much bigger and better. Lack of graphics, and the simplicity of the puzzles let down a pretty impressive little game. It's well worth a playthrough though, as you can pick up the .tap image from the itch page completely for free and play it without buying the tape, and the whole game can be finished in under an hour.
