SIlk Dust

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 s, e, w, up, down. 

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".