Download Guild of Thieves, The

The adventure begins in the Master Thief's boat. You jump confidently to the jetty and begin a survey of the expansive countryside. The numerous locations range from castle to cave and from scrub to snow-capped peak. The descriptions, even without the graphics much-praised on other formats, are extremely atmospheric; even the most commonplace objects have their own characteristics. Exploration has some very realistic qualities: as you wander through the castle you can run your fingers casually along the piano keys or try your skill at potting the billiard balls. While the graphics are only sliding screenshots, the text describes it all, the Magneitc Scrolls' team writers are just that good.

The treasures are often quite easy to locate but difficult to collect. A jewel hanging from the ceiling of a cave is about to drop into a bubbling pool of quicksand; a silver chalice is inconveniently placed in the cage of a savage bear. Reckless burglars quickly come to grief! Unlike most text-based adventure games, you will usually have a mental image of the whole scene, due to the parser's extreme description.

The puzzles are often tough but at least have the virtue of being logical. The adventure is certainly more accessible than The Pawn which was occasionally open to charges of excessive obscurity. In The Guild it's sometimes the very obviousness of the solution which makes a problem difficult. While they are hard, they seem perhaps too hard even for certain seasoned adventurers.

The parser is up to Magnetic Scrolls' usually high standards: as well as complex sentences it accepts FIND and SEARCH FOR commands to locate objects you may have forgotten or misplaced. The GO TO command lets you move from one location to another without typing in all the directions in between. In practice this can be quite dangerous as you can't stop the command once entered and the program marches you straight into whatever obstacles (for example a closed drawbridge) there may be in the way.

Overall, if you're into thieves, really, really hard puzzles and text, this is one of the best!