Paradise in Microdot

You actually won't meet a tall dark strangler (as far as I know), but this is the message you get from the fortune teller in the game, whose sole purpose is to make this joke. That gives you a fine impression of Paradise in Microdot. It is (obviously) an old school adventure game that has you walk around the map, struggle with a limited parser, pick up objects, and use them for puzzles that are usually not too hard, but certainly made more difficult by the parser and one's complete inability to gain extra information through the 'examine' verb. There are also quite a lot of riddles. I used the walkthrough by Dorothy Irene to get past the more difficult points.

The game has good-humoured charm. Some of these older adventure games have a tendency to berate the player and make fun of them. There's a little bit of that here, but mostly the game seems to enjoy your success. It throws pictures of smiling people and animals at you when you've solved a puzzle. And one just feels that the author enjoyed themselves a lot when they came up with the riddles and the weird locations.

You can play the game on your own PC on a ZX Spectrum emulator (though I couldn't get my keyboard input to function) or online. The online emulator wasn't entirely stable, and when the game crashed on me close to the end, I decided to not replay everything. But I suspect that the final parts will not be too different from the earlier ones.

(I played this game as part of an IFDB Spelunking expedition where I try to play through ten random games.)

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