itch.io Community » General » Release Announcements

The Beast of Torrack Moor - 30th Anniversary Edition

A topic by Adventuron created Dec 19, 2018 Views: 461 Replies: 3

Viewing posts 1 to 3

Adventuron5 years ago (1 edit)

LINK : The Beast of Torrack Moor : 30th Anniversary Edition

The Beast (1988) was a classic adventure game, for the ZX Spectrum, written by Linda Doughty, that arrived at the dawn of the "twilight" era of UK text adventures (where commercial viability disappeared and dozens of authors self-published).

It was well reviewed in "Crash" magazine, and is generally considered to be one of the high-points of UK homespun narrative-focused text-adventures in this era.

This anniversary edition, released with the approval of Linda herself, leverages the web as a platform to create an experience that feels retro, yet has a lot of value-add features that would have been impossible on the original cassette tape release - such as autosave, autocompletion, command history, 4k monitor support, together with bugfixes and minor enhancement ;-).

This is not a straight port or emulation, but running on a new text adventure engine called Adventuron, that exposes the features of modern browsers and theming to create the illusion of an infinite variety of virtual 8-bit system.

Completely free to play - give it a try today.

NOTE: Due to this bug on the itch platform, the game is borderline unplayable on small screen devices (forced into landscape orientation), so please play on desktop devices until the bug is resolved (tested to play fine on mobile without this bug).

Deleted post5 years ago

Deleted 109 days ago

Adventuron5 years ago

Thanks for the comment about the game. If you are enjoying it, it's a tribute to Linda.

Thanks for the link, but the game already deals with orientation perfectly. The bug occurs in the Itch wrapper around my HTML5 game, therefore there is nothing I can do, as orientation information seems to be intercepted and withheld from my application.

I have posted the bug report, and I'm sure that it will be resolved soon enough.

The Beast is the first HTML5 application of this genre that specifically targets mobile (I believe), and it really has been designed to REQUIRE portrait mode (on tablet, it is much less of an issue due to more screen space). These teething issues will pass.

mrpete5 years ago

Yeah, this is a very good cross-over to HTML5. Text based setup's were never my strong point but my friends like them alot, and I watched them to see where the game would go.

Adventuron5 years ago

Thanks for the comment. I wish I had metrics for how many people loaded the game, and how many played it, but I have no idea. For all I know, no-one has played it to the end so nice comments like these are welcome.