The Pawn: Won!

At last, my quest.

Old Gooseberry has surprisingly little to say about Kronos when asked directly - he just mutters "I'd make him the Himmler of hell" which raises some questions on the whereabouts of the actual Himmler, but when asked about my wristband, sends me on an errand to collect his soul. He doesn't mention that he gave Kronos his powers to begin with, and for that matter, why does he need me? Kronos isn't immortal, and his soul is already payable upon his death. Impatient much?

Well, I need to find a use for this potion. Despite what the devil said, I can simply drink it - no need to open it (technically he didn't lie), but the result is death. Right now my only unsolved problem is a dragon, but I try throwing the potion (it just shatters), offering the potion (he accepts but refuses to drink it), even the old standby KILL DRAGON (he just eats you).

It's another stupid and unsolvable puzzle. The key detail here are some "hazy shadows" in the room, and looking at them reveals they are halflings (and then you get eaten right after), but I'll let the solution speak for itself.

 

Past the chamber, Kronos awaits.

You have one move before he casts you out, but the devil's potion and aerosoul can work here.

To leave and not get eaten, you must wear his hat and cloak, and also take his magic wand. The dragon signposts this in a manner that's somehow both obvious ("Wait a minute, you aren't Kronos," he remarks before eating you, should you egress without these accoutrements), and at the same time misleading ("He was taller and greyer around the temples," he continues, and repeats without variance if you wear the wrong hat - there are two in the room to pick from - or miss the wand).

At this point I realized that I softlocked myself by leaving my rope in hell. You'd think that if you secured a rope to an anchor point, climbed down, and left the rope where it was, you'd still find one end of it tied to the anchor point on your return, but Magnetic Scrolls logic doesn't work that way. The rope only exists in one room at a time - climb down and now the rope is at the bottom of the precipice instead of the top - and since I neglected to take it with me (how?), it's still there, with no way to retrieve it. You have to descend, then "UNTIE ROPE" (again, how?) in order to leave the area with it. Simply let go of it, and the rope will be left at the bottom, irretrievable.

And on your return trip, you'd better not untie the rope because Satan won't give you a free teleport out this time.

 

So I restarted and replayed up to this point. There's a few things you really don't need to do; the horse is pointless, though murdering the adventurer is worth some points. The ice tower is also pointless, but murdering the snowman outside (done by performing "MELT SNOWMAN WITH RED" before mixing the colors despite there being absolutely no indication that the RED gives off heat) also gives some points.

Very definitely leave.

We're not quite done - now that the wristband is off, we can leave the game world by the southern boundary, but there's nothing outside the confines of the computer's memory map, and no way back (except a restore).

One more thing we have to do to score that last lousy point. That potted plant we got near the beginning of the game? PLANT PLANT IN POT WITH TROWEL. The game never gave any indication that the plant in the pot needed planting with a trowel, but it does, and it's worth five points.

And with that, we can enter Magnetic Scrolls' debug room.

 

And now we've unlocked debug mode, which is actually quite cool! With it, you can go anywhere freely, nothing will kill you, and every room will list most of the objects you can interact with. It's not that helpful now that the game is solved, but there's actually quite a few of these objects in the game world that aren't part of the solution but have programmed interactions anyway.

 

If only some of the effort that went into fleshing out the game world went into making the critical path solvable instead!

GAB rating: Bad.

There's more to The Pawn than meets the eye, and I plan on touching on some of its hidden depths in one last post, but this adventure is deeply flawed.

It was never going to get a fantastic rating. The Pawn wants to be Zork, which always stood high above its peers with its awesome parser, concisely detailed writing, and design that serves worldbuilding just as much as gameplay, but falls short of that goal in every regard. Kerovnia is sprawling but directionless and noncohesive, offering a flat, open overworld and a bunch of gated-off regions branching off it like so many VERB-NOUN adventures that it mocks, and the descriptive prose, though hardly terse, never excites or evokes the sensation of being there in the way that Infocom did with a quarter of the memory available. Puzzles are generally of the USE KEY IN DOOR variety, and bring frustration whenever they try to get more clever than that. The plot never reaches any kind of conclusion, even though it suggests some ongoings beyond your basic treasure hunt, and even involves you in them (a little).

It's also a bit mean spirited, encouraging or even requiring you to perform atrocities to advance the plot and/or score points. I suppose there's a subversiveness in that you're better off not rescuing the princess and voting for Baconburger instead, but I'd have appreciated some reason why this makes sense for your non-Kerovnian citizen character to do, and not just because it's worth more points.

But the real problems stem from a combination of two factors. There's technical issues - Magnetic Scrolls' parser occupies a deadly space where it's more sophisticated than its VERB-NOUN contemporaries but janky enough that it often struggles to understand the sort of complex verbiage that you're expected to feed it, making guess-the-verb exponentially more complicated. And there's quality control issues - for all of the nonessential objects that they gave descriptors and interactivity to, descriptions of essential objects are missing crucial details, sensible interactions often give nonsense replies, the game often gives flat-out incorrect information, and that's when it doesn't have bugs! Far too often, I simply had no idea if my attempts to solve a puzzle were wrong because I wasn't thinking about a valid action or because I had typed it in wrong or because the stars weren't aligned right when I did. Infocom was successful not just because of their technical sophistication, but because they made the effort to ensure that their games gave responses to things that players would try. And as we've seen here, one without the other makes for a frustrating experience.

There's also an annoying quirk of the QL in that its keyboard lacks debouncing, makking it  easy to accidentally type llikee thiss. But I don't fault Magnetic Scrolls for that, even though this didn't do anything to make the experience more pleasant.

The Pawn isn't the worst adventure game I've covered, but there was little joy in exploring it, and none in solving it.

 

My Trizbort map: