Every silver lining has a cloud...
JUST WHEN A MAN THINKS HIS LUCK IS RUNNING OUT...
... things start getting even worse. He gets run over by a bus. Sprayed with cheese sandwich by a supernatural being. Smashed against a tunnel by a speeding train. He falls from two thousand feet into an artificial waterfall. He gets drunk, drowned and cursed. He gets incinerated, widdled on, folded,bent, spindled, mutilated and generally mucked about with.
And in return ?
In return he gets the leading role in a perplexing, hilarious race against time and chance, set in a jinxed land menaced by the impending death of good fortune.
Who are we talking about? Who is holding this box?
You guessed it.
Look on the bright side. It could be your luckiest move yet. Jinxter comes from Magnetic Scrolls, authors of international award-winning adventures The Pawn and The Guild of Thieves. It's more than a collection of crossword puzzles; it's a whole universe, where things behave as they do in the real world... with some alarming exceptions. Don't expect tiresome trolls, obvious orcs, silly spells and wet, wimpish witches in JINXTER. Infuriating, enchanting, absurd and hilarious by turns, JINXTER will surprise you with every move you make.
But don't forget: every lining has a cloud...
JINXTER - SOME PEOPLE HAVE ALL THE LUCK.
The original story was written by Anita Sinclair's sister, Georgina.
It was subsequently altered quite a bit by Michael Bywater.
A new, official, updated versions was released in 2019 by StrandGames https://strandgames.itch.io/jinxter
In 2020 an officially authorised version of the remastered edition of the game was released for the Spectrum Next; see here.
[+] Users currently playing this game
I really need to replay this - I managed to solve the puzzles back then (20+ years ago), but the plot made little to no sense. I guess Fish! deserves another go as well...
Great Game, just recently completed it and is as eccentric as they come! Never lacking a sense of humour and many of the puzzles can be solved using an alternative way. Atmospheric throughout and ironic ending!
The surrealismn and the jokiness are ladled on a bit too thickly in places. Magnetic Scrolls "wossnames" remind me of the Cheez jokes in the Unkullian series of adventures by Advention; sometimes less is more.
That reservation aside this is one of the best examples of late eighties parser games - certainly Magnetic Scrolls games seemed to improve with each subsequent release although David Bishop's Wonderland remains the best of the oeuvre in my opinion.
This is surprisingly buggy. There are quite a few typos in the game i.e. the fire is aligh, walrusses (sic). Trying to melt anything provokes a blank parser response. Push X often elicits "you move the X but nothing happens" for instance a counter or a bookshelf; the intended item or object clearly hasn't moved at all. In the beer garden the command "get in well" causes the response "you can't see a well here" when it is next to you. The command "Dig" elicits "how bizarre" or "you can't be serious!" when you are standing in a field or by some dirt for example.
You can also elicit responses from the clockmaker when you aren't even in the same room as him!