8K Adventure

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Bare Bones Can Still Be Worth A Gnaw, April 23, 2008
In Dunric’s 8k Adventure, prolific (fringe?) IF designer Paul Allen Panks endeavors to cram a fantasy text adventure into fewer than 170 lines of BASIC code. I can’t comment on the writing in this game because there isn’t any. In very-old-school fashion (many Scott Adams titles would seem lush by comparison), the game’s 25 locations are sparsely implemented, barely described, and mostly empty ... but moving around and mapping the tiny world provided me with a genuine, if brief, sense of exploration, and the game’s few details are well-chosen to evoke a basic, unassuming trad-fantasy atmosphere. In my own imagination, these simple details took on lives of their own, and without prose to manhandle my mind’s eye, I still saw (for example) the game's forest cottage with clarity, and paused to wonder who might live there. This world isn’t much, but the arrangement is easy to explore and map, and the spare setting taps neatly into the cultural common ground of stock-fantasy imagery.

8k Adventure offers only an unadorned, skeletal game design: simple exploration, a few hit-point-chewing fight sequences, and a very basic puzzle structure of find-the-item-that-lets-you-move-onward. It is both easy and forgiving. If you've felt weighed down by prose-heavy works, this bare-bones game, unencumbered by meat or sauce, might lighten your palate pleasantly. Skeletal it may be, but dem bones (dem bones) gonna walk around.

Tiny, slight, fast, and easy: 8k Adventure makes only the humblest of promises … but it keeps them.