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The Pawn Category: Game Genre: Adventure (Graphics & Text) Status: Released Format: Digital Cost: Free Team: Strand Games Author(s): Stefan Bylund (Conversion), Niclas Karlsson (Magnetic Interpreter), Magnetic Scrolls (Original) Graphics: Stefan Bylund (Conversion), Magnetic Scrolls (Original) Audio: Oleg Nikitin (Nik-O) Remastering: Hugh Steers, Stefan Meier Font: Phoebus Dokos Language: English Website: https://strandgames.com/projects/zxnext

You wake up in a strange place... Trapped - destiny of good or evil? Set in the mythical world of Kerovnia, this amusing and complex tale is subtle enough to appeal to the beginner and hardened adventurer alike.

The adventure tells the story of King Erik, Princess Lattecia and Kronos the ambitious Court Magician. And you; a man of free will or only a pawn in their game... Kerovnia has been plunged into a period of tremendous social upheaval. King Erik has begun to lose his hold over the Kerovnian people and can no longer rely on their loyalty and devotion through these times of war, famine and personal bankruptcy.

Your objectives are manyfold: The simplest is to escape from Kerovnia, but you will find others as you wander about the land and communicate with the characters you meet. Everything from a legless talking horse to the devil himself!

This is a remastered conversion by Strand Games of the illustrated text adventure game The Pawn. The Pawn was first released by Magnetic Scrolls for the Sinclair QL in 1985. The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga versions released the following year were groundbreaking in providing premium graphics in combination with an advanced parser. A text-only version of the game was released for the Spectrum 128/+3. The new and improved version for Spectrum Next contains full graphics and uses the remastered version of the game with playability improvements and bug fixes.

The conversion has been made using the Spectrum Next porting of Magnetic; an open-source Magnetic Scrolls interpreter. The graphics are from the original Commodore Amiga version and have been converted to the Spectrum Next colour palette.

The game combines the layer 2 mode for showing colourful graphics and the Timex hi-res mode for displaying high-resolution text with a proportional font. The graphics can be scrolled up and down using the keyboard or mouse to make more or less room for the text. The text colour can be changed to your liking by cycling through a palette of 32 hand-picked colours. The game state can be saved to and loaded from an SD card.

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