Catacombs
Supersoft 
1981
- Aka:
- Catacombs Revisited
- Language:
- English
- Authors:
- Brian Cotton
- Platforms:
- Amstrad CPC , Amstrad PCW , C16/Plus4, C64/128 , PC , PET
- Genres:
- Fantasy, misc., Treasure hunt
- Related:
- Classic Quests [1: Catacombs, 2: Witch Hunt, 3: Cornucopia, 4: Forestland, 5: Goblin Towers]
- Entered by:
- Gunness, Strident
- Added:
- 07-06-2018
- Edited:
- 25-10-2021
Synopsis
Plot
The old Gothic church, so the locals say, used to have a veritable labyrinth of passages beneath it, but the whereabouts of the entrance to the passages has ling since been forgotten. The church itself has fallen into disuse for a variety of reasons, the main one being the sinister aura that surrounds one of the large tombs in the church graveyard. The church's treasures have long since disappeared without a trace.An ancient local legend, all but forgotten now, tells of a vast underground land inhabited by weird monsters guarding wonderful treasures. Could there be any connection between this legend and the lost treasures? By the way, if you do find any treasure, take it back to the church, and lay it on the altar - after all, it doesn't belong to you!
CATACOMBS is a large and complex adventure which is definitely not for beginners. Many of the puzzles to be solved are unusual, with ingenious solutions, and will stretch your imagination to its limits.
Notes
Originally a Commodore PET game from March 1981, making it one of the earliest British-authored home computer text adventures. See 8bitAG for details. Peter Calver, of Supersoft, has confirmed that the game was written by Brian Cotton.The game was remade and released as part of the later Classic Quests series for a wider range of platforms; including C64, Plus/4, CPC/PCW, and PC.
The original Commodore PET version of this game is currently lost, but the later Classic Quests "Revisited" version was recovered from a collector in 2021.
Resources (Upload file)
- Map
- by Alex
- Hints
- by Alex
- Further Info:
- Search at CPC-Power
- Search at Gamebase64
- Search at Museum of Computer Adventure Game History
- Search at Plus/4 World
[+] Users who have solved this game
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This is an excellent game with a very robust parser for its time and evocative desriptions. T
Two caveats I have come across are that you can only save one game state and that is to memory, which of course is cleared upon closing the DOS window. I have tried plugging in an external drive and reassigning the drive letter to a: when prompted to save to disk but to no avail. The game also crashed when left open in DosBox 0.74 overnight so I had to restart from the beginning.
Creating and mounting a virtual a:\ floppy drive on the c: drive using the -t switch in DosBox and copying the Catacombs directory to it doesn't seem to work.
I finally worked out how to save the game states by downloading DOSBox-X 0.83.19 and creating a floppy image using the IMGMAKE disk.ima -t fd command. I then mounted the c drive as c:\dosbox and ran the IMGMOUNT a: disk.ima command. Now when I attempt to create a save file and choose an option from 0 to 9 on the a:drive the game state is saved. It's only taken me five hours to work out!
It's probably worth pointing out to anyone playing this game that there is currently an active thread in the forum about it here: http://solutionarchive.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1695