Reign of Grelok is a mini text adventure game that can be played on a terminal in Hubris Comics and was programmed by the Hubris Comics software division. It follows classic text adventure conventions with commands like "Inventory", "Go North" etc. It is only a few pages long, and there is no reward for completing it.
Walkthrough
The player starts with a rusty sword and a drinking flask in their inventory, standing on a wide plain. From there, one can head to four locations:
- A mountain to the north.
- A swamp to the west.
- A town to the south.
- A chapel to the east.
Head north to the mountain, look around and investigate the glinting object to find a rough gemstone in a crag, which gets added to the inventory. Turn south and reach the plain again.
Head west into the swamp, look around and speak with the wizard, who will take the previously collected gem and split it into two parts, a polished gemstone and a magical shard, and return both to the player. Turn east and reach the plain again.
Head south into the town, and speak with the blacksmith, who will take the polished gem as payment and use the magical shard upgrade the player's sword from rusty to magic. Speak with the priest to receive a side quest. Then head north to reach the plain once more.
Head east to the chapel, look around, attack the zombie with the sword, and inspect the grave to receive its head as a trophy. Turn west to reach the plain, then turn south to get to the town. Speak with the priest to receive the key to the chapel. Head north to the plain and turn east to the chapel again. Examine the chapel and fill the drinking flask with holy water.
Finally, head west to the plain and then north to the mountain, and use the magic sword on Grelok. This completes the game and results in a short note about the outcome of Grelok's defeat.
Notes
If speaking with the wizard after the magic sword has been forged, he will repeat the dialogue about returning with the magic gem and will give the polished gem and magical shard again. The blacksmith can then forge a new magic sword, though no additional ones will be added to the players inventory. This can be repeated as many times as the player likes, but has no effect on completing the game.
Behind the scenes
This pays homage to the text-based adventure games popular in the 1980s on various personal computers, which still enjoy a small but active cult following today. They use text-only parsers, where the user types in commands to perform actions. Many were extensive in scale, requiring the user to create detailed 'pen and paper' maps. The best known were published by Infocom: the Zork series, Planetfall, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.