‘Exciting new Amiga Text Adventure by French author Davide Bucci’
Great news for fans of French author and interactive fiction writer Davide Bucci who has recently released the third game in his text adventure series that follows the exploits of super sleuth Emilia Vittorini. Titled Silk Dust the game sees Emilia going back to her racing roots as she represents her father’s steam powered car company ‘ITA’ who are in the process of delivering a new race car to one of their most prestigious clients, Princess Briccorosso, who intends to race in the Silk Road Rally from Cairo & Peking. Your role is initially to ensure the smooth delivery of the car and make sure everything is working as it should.
Sounds simple enough, but rest assured it’s not long before Emilia finds herself caught up in yet another well written adventure with danger around every turn. I highly recommend that you also check out both of Davide’s first two text adventures, Two Days to the Race & The Queens Footsteps which is a fantastic adventure centred around the myths of Egyptology and cults. Both also feature Emilia but are not essential to have played if you just fancy jumping straight into Silk Dust.
Interested? You should be! you can download and play Silk Dust for free here:
Black Dawn: Rebirth is a sci-fi horror dungeon crawler for the Commodore Amiga. It is the seventh episode in the Black Dawn series which dates all the way back to 1994 and has been developed in part by one of the games original authors Shaun Watters.
Loading the game, we are presented with a visually stunning introductory cut scene that introduces us to our hero Ensign Bren who is en route in his ship to planet Thalax 9 where a communications blackout has been reported. Landing on the planet all appears to be normal from the outside but Bren has a gut feeling that not all is well on the inside. The cut scene concludes with Bren entering the base and descending into the levels below of which there are a total of twenty-one to explore across seven different towers.
Starting the game, you are presented with a well laid out HUD featuring directional controls and your health status. There are also other spaces that will eventually display weapons read outs, a map and items carried. Exploring the game, you’ll need to quickly locate some weapons, of which there are fourteen in total, as it won’t be long before you come up against your first terrifying enemy. The enemies themselves are well drawn thanks to the talents of renowned Amiga coder Ten Shu, and include possessed soldiers, zombies, deranged androids, alien beings and demonic ‘Doom-like’ beings to name but a few. Sadly, though they do all feel slightly static and lack a great deal of animation.
As well as weapons you’ll need to locate key cards which are required to access new areas of the dungeon. Thankfully there are also plenty of first aid kids dotted around to keep your health topped up. There are some logical puzzles to solve in the game, all of which mainly relate to access issues.
Graphically for the Amiga the game looks great and has a ‘digitised’ look to it that I really like. It will run on any Amiga system as long as there is 1.5Mb of memory available but it will take advantage of and runs smoother on a machine with extra memory. Musically composer Mike Richmond creates an eerie title track that sets the atmosphere and tone for the game perfectly during the intro sequence and it’s a real shame that this doesn’t continue into the game-play where all that can be heard is the distant low hum of machinery. The in-game combat sound effects are basic yet adequate.
The game was released as a physical boxed copy that features six 3.5” floppy disks, a manual and map booklet for drawing in and taking notes. The game can also be digitally downloaded in .ADF format for a ‘Name your own price’ donation. The physical copy sadly is currently sold out. A stunning dungeon crawler for the Amiga that brings the Black Dawn series right up to date. Atmospheric, eerie and chock full of classic dungeon crawling action. Highly recommended.