The Adventures of Barsak the Dwarf

We’ve arrived at the first Gilsoft released game in our alphabetical adventures with The Adventures of Barsak the Dwarf. Anybody familiar with the adventure writing system The Quill will recognise the style and format here immediately. It’s a standard text adventure with the tried and tested parser mechanics and vocabulary. This game (subtitled The Early Days suggesting there is more to come from Barsak) was written by P and V Napolitano, published by Gilsoft as part of their Gold Collection, and released on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in 1984. The Quill system is a complicated one and can make for some very complex stories with well described and detailed locations. Barsak wasn’t one of those. The location descriptions were sacrificed to make the game seem large with around 120 locations, but with only so much memory to accommodate the adventure, descriptions were kept to a minimum. It is described elsewhere as “more a series of death-traps to overcome by utilising the right…