Tristam Island by Hugo Labrande

After crashing your plane at sea, you end up drifting to a small island, with not much to survive. You explore, and find out the island was inhabited, years ago. But why did the people leave? And why is there a fence around the white house at the top of the hill?

“Sizzler! […] Outstanding, one of the best modern text adventures to date.” — ZZap!64″The game’s density is very satisfying. More than once the solution to some puzzle occured to me while I was elsewhere in the game, and I had to rush back to the puzzle’s location with ideas jostling in my head.” — Juiced.GS”Tristam Island plays wonderfully intuitively and keeps you captivated for hours in front of the Amiga.” — Amiga Future”Tristam Island is definitely recommendable to all text adventure fans, not only experts, thanks to its relative accessibility.” — Al’s 2021 Spectrum AnnualGit repository, including source code: https://github.com/hlabrand/tristam-islandFrench translation available at this page: https://hlabrande.itch.io/l-ile-tristam

TRISTAM ISLAND is a text adventure made from the mold of Infocom; expect a large geography to explore, lots of prose, a rich parser, diverse puzzles, some humor and some darkness. To use Infocom’s classification, I’d rate the game’s difficulty as “Standard”; however, the game’s design is modern and eschews all the frustrations commonly associated with 1980s text adventures. No hunger timers, no frustrating mazes, no blocking situations that force you to restart!

You can download disk images for 36 different platforms:- Commodore PET, VIC-20, Plus/4, Commodore 64 and 128, and also a MEGA65 version;- Atari 8-bit (400, 800, XL, XE), and the Atari ST;- Amiga (all the way back to the 500);- Spectrum +3;- Amstrad CPC & PCW;- MSX 1 & MSX 2;- BBC Model B, BBC Model B+, BBC Master 128, and Acorn Electron;- Apple II, Macintosh, and OS X;- 16-bit MS-DOS, Windows (32 and 64 bit);- Linux (32 and 64 bit);- TI-99/4A, and also a port for the TI-84+CE calculator;- Oric Atmos & Telestrat;- TRS CoCo;- Nintendo GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, and Nintendo DS;- Dreamcast.You also get the naked “.z3” file to run in your favourite interpreter, allowing you to play on any platform with a Z-Machine interpreter, including the Spectrum Next, the Raspberry Pi, the Palm Pilot, etc. Instructions are also available for CP/M machines (Osborne I, Kaypro II, DEC Rainbow, but also the PC-88), and for the TRS-80 Model III. You won’t find many games that can be played on that many platforms!

I hope you’ll enjoy the game, please leave a comment if you did! And tips are appreciated if you want to say thanks and buy me a coffee! Thank you!

(Cover art by Karen Christie and Stephen F. Winsor.)