Black Sanctum, The Download (1984 Adventure Game)

The Black Sanctum begins in a rugged, snow-covered mountain country. Your task is to rid the ancient monastery of evil that has taken over. Your task is compounded by the fact that the entrance to the ancient monastery is hidden and cloaked in secrecy.

This graphical interactive fiction game uses standard single letter commands N,S,E,W for movement. You can also SAVE your current location on cassette for restarting later. The command parser is a standard verb-noun type (Go Door, for example).

In mid-1980s, a small company called Mark Data Products released 6 parser-based graphic adventure games similar to early Polarware and Scott Adams titles. While the games are reasonably successful on Tandy's CoCo computer, the IBM PC versions did not achieve the same level of success. While the graphics are quite good at the time, the parser is quite primitive - only simple verb+noun constructs such as GET HAT are understood, and some verbs that are common in IF games such as SEARCH are not always recognized. Fortunately, the games make up for primitive parser with well-written plot, fun characters, and some clever puzzles.

The plot of The Black Sanctum: "Encounter the forces of black magic as you roam around an old 18th century monastery. See all the evil locations in this spooky adventure in full hi-res detail. If you like suspense, you'll love searching out and destroying the evil in this classic tale."

Thanks to the generosity of Bob Withers, co-creator of these old games who put both the games and their source codes up on his website for free download, you can now experience a forgotten past of the early days of adventure gaming. All are recommended, but if you want the best of the bunch, I highly recommend my personal favorites: Trekboer and Calixto Island.

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

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