We play the part of Fritz van Noon, leader of the Unorthodox Engineers, who has been called to the planet Ithica by Dr. Maxwell Courtney to face the problem of The Dark. The Dark is a gigantic mushroom-shaped structure of unknown origin which is totally black and seems to absorb all forms of energy. The shadow cast by the Dark's dome over the surface of the planet is called the Pen, short for
Penumbra. It is a zone where strange physical phenomena take place. Our goal is
to find out the nature of the anomaly and somehow solve its mystery.
Based on the eponymous short story from the collection The Unorthodox Engineers by Colin Capp.
A Dragon version was almost ready but never released due to the platform's lack of sales.
A sequel, The Subways of Tazoo, was planned but scrapped.
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This adventure is unorthodox, like the engineers it depicts, but not in a good way. Too coarsely coded and ill-balanced. It is arguably a single-problem task, which is so long-winded to solve that it becomes tedious very quickly. The existing walkthrough is just a descriptive sketch of actions and is missing some parts, so I have written a literal one.