The Aching (For More, Perhaps)

In another attempt to support small indie studios, I decided to check out The Aching, a Sierra On-Line style parser-based adventure with a distinct horror theme built by The Lobdegg. The game started out as a game jam submission in the biannual DOS Game Jam hosted by Michael Klamerus on itch.io. It started out as a small prototype but turned into a proper release that even got a bunch of content-heavy patches later on. But what exactly is Aching besides our appetite for more old school adventure games? There’s one thing that you must know about The Aching before you dive into it: the developer put in months and months of effort to create a parser engine from scratch that works on any original 8086 IBM PC. The full release is less than a megabyte big. This is not one of those new games made to look like an old one with the Unity engine. No; this is a labour of low-level C(++) and Assembly love that will work on your thirty year old computer. This alone stands out as a remarkable…