Return of The Sword

When recently you helped your friend Ezekiel Throgmeister little did you realise what that might lead to. Now his colleague Jedediah Strangeblossom wants to involve you in a quest to restore Excalibur to its original owner.

Return of The Sword is a text-only interactive fiction fantasy game, very much in the 'old-school' style. It was written from the ground up for the PC using qBasic64, and has a comprehensive and powerful parser.  Included in the game are detailed HELP instructions, and I have also added comprehensive hints, both implicit and explicit, which can be accessed using the command HINT.

Also inbuilt into the game there is  a full scripting facility using the commands SCRIPT and UNSCRIPT, with the ability to view the script file in-game via the HISTORY command. If the file 'walkthrough.txt' is placed in the root folder this can also be viewed in-game by the command WALKTHRU. The script file can be deleted as an option with the command  DELETE.

Incidentally, there are no NPCs.

I would consider this game to be relatively easy and fairly linear, I have also provided a walkthrough and  maps, although they will give information which could spoil your enjoyment.

There are a few decorative rooms and red herring items. Several MP3 files are included in the downloaded zip file to produce sound effects, but presence of these files is not essential for the game to run. Sound effects may play either automatically in certain locations or on the occurrence of certain events. Sound functionality can be toggled off and on by using the command SOUND.

I can't over-emphasise that new players should read the HELP instructions before starting play. Although a lot of the information given therein will already be completely familiar to most players, there are some important specifics such as the method of taking items from containers and supporters, and also the ability to define function keys to implement commonly-used commands without the need to type them in full.

There are an additional two pluses to this game...

1. There is no possibility of sudden unexpected death.
2. There is essentially no inventory limit.  (well, actually 3,000 weight units)

Reaching an unwinnable position is not actually impossible, but would be difficult to achieve and you would really have to do something silly to manage this. Since your inventory is virtually limitless, it is advisable never to discard anything. You are also advised to save your position occasionally as a safeguard.

Although written for windows on the PC it could be run on Linux using WINE and also on MacOS using a Windows emulator such as CrossOver.

There has been very little in the way of beta testing, so some bugs may surface. If you come across any I'd be grateful if you'd let me know. The email address can be found by entering the command 'AUTHOR' in the game.