Today is April 19, 1907. You, Emilia Vittorini, arrived yesterday in Varenna, on the shore of the beautiful Lake Como. You are hosted at the magnificent Villa Briccorosso; Princess Lucilla Briccorosso is preparing for the Silk Road Race, a 10,000km rally raid between Cairo in Egypt and Peking in China, to be done by car.

You represent ITA, founded by your father, the company that built the car the Princess just bought to use during the rally. The car is supposed to be delivered today. Your role will be to assist the delivery and make sure everything is perfectly functional.

SYSTEMS

C64, VIC20+32K, C128, Plus/4, PET models with at least 32K of RAM, Amiga, CPC 664 or CPC6128, MSX, ZX Spectrum 48K, MS-DOS, Macintosh 68k, CP/M, Olivetti M20, RC2014,  Atari 800, Apple II, Atari ST.

GAME MUSIC

I wrote some original music for the game that you can download here: https://darwinne.itch.io/silk-dust-original-soundtrack

INSTRUCTIONS

Silk Dust is a text adventure game that you can play on your vintage computers. A text adventure is a game where all the interaction takes places with textand you instruct your alter ego by typing command at a prompt. The rest is done by your fantasy!

Here are some important commands:

look: describe again the location where the player is present 

examine object: describe the specified object 

north or n or go to north: moves to the north, if possible. Other directions are sewupdown

The command bye allows to exit from the game and restart well... it restarts it. You can take objects that you "notice" and you can have a list of carried objects with inventory.

The following abbreviations are available:

  • l for look
  • x or ex for examine
  • i or inve or inven for inventory

The game is divided in four parts. When you complete one of them, you will get a code that allows to immediately jump to the beginning of the next part. Write down that to resume the game in the future. Passwords are important, write them down!

On some platforms, you can save and load the game (use  save and  load).

HINTS

Draw a map! Examine every object mentioned in the description, it may reveal other details of the story or contribute to the general atmosphere. Think outside the box: to open a locked door you don't always need a key! In general, while playing the game, do not adopt "use" to perform an action, try to be more specific: "pour water on fire" may be better than "use water with fire".

Download

Download NowName your own price

Click download now to get access to the following files:

Commodore 64 disk image
External
Commodore VIC20+32K disk image
External
Commodore 128 disk image
External
Commodore Plus/4 disk image
External
Commodore PET disk image
External
Commodore Amiga disk image
External
CPC 664 or CPC 6128 disk image
External
MSX tape and cart images
External
ZX Spectrum 48K/Plus3 (TAP and DSK files)
External
ZX Spectrum 48K (WAV files)
External
MS-DOS executable
External
Macintosh 68k disk image
External
CP/M executable files
External
Olivetti M20 disk image
External
RC2014 ihx files for the hexload tool
External
Atari 800 (48KB)
External
Apple ][ (DOS 3.3, 48KB)
External
Atari ST
External
Cambridge Z88
External

Development log

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Comments

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(3 edits)

I have played both prequels and I found them nice to play with a good story, although I don't know if it is just me, but the online playing is too slow, and many times I have to enter the commands twice as the first time I got always a "I beg your pardon?" prompt.

Hi, thank you for the feedback. I'll have a look at it. What is the browser you are using?

Hi Davide, I'm using Firefox, but I can also try it on Brave as well.

I tested the game on Firefox. Does it happen repeatably when you start the game, or you noticed the slow down gets worse after a while?

It's even quite slow even from the beginning, if you compare it with interpreters like Frotz for example or if you play it on the Amiga, but it's getting slower as long as you play.

This looks awesome! Will there be a physical release like the previous game?

Thank you! Not for the moment, but the future will tell.

The future is here! :)

Indeed!!!

(1 edit)

Man it would be awesame, when some of you text-adventures would be ported for the Mega Drive or the NES. But first, thank you for your great work you made the past years.

Hi and thank you very much! I'm glad that you like the games.

I thought about those systems, but I was dubious, as they do not have a keyboard. The entire gameplay (currently based on a parser) would need to be rethought. Are there examples of similar text adventure games ported there? How are they working?

Implementing a menu system would change quite a lot the structure of the game, I fear.

Cheers,

D.

Hi, 

your a right. I will think abut it. Maybe some ideas comes in my mind.  When I got some, I will conatact you, I think. 

Have a nice day 

J. R.

(1 edit)

Hi,

some Ideas, wich came in my mind last day:

  • A in game keyboard
  • buttons combinations
  • someone write the game new, so that you have it like the adventure game Asterix comics 


I didn't played it yet, but this game can be an example: https://vetea.itch.io/la-citadelle-du-chaos-megadrive

Have all a nice day!

Love multi system releases! Good job.

Thank you! I hope you'll enjoy the game!

(+1)

Oh, this looks interesting. :) I'll be waiting patiently for the playable story/adventure!

(+1)

Thank you! It is too early to give a date, but finishing the game will surely take some months.

Cheers,

D.