The Errand Boy

YANASTG

Thanks to AtariMania, I got wind of a new game for the Atari ST, by Dwalin. It was originally released last year for something called MS-DOS, whatever that might be. It's a short conversational adventure ported to DAAD for several home computers, one of which is our lovely Atari ST. The only computer that matters.

The Errand Boy is a graphical-style adventure and prequel to Rudolphine Rur. It's not too dissimilar to what we've seen before with imagery and written text to describe our current location. We are Galdrin who appears to be at odds with Mr Eldrad because he thinks of us as nothing more than an errand boy. In a huff, we leave because that's no way to treat someone who's been in service for a thousand years so he's gonna pay!

(Hang on, how old am I? Erm, am I even human? What's going on?)

We begin in a grungy room located somewhere in New York, near Central Park. The graphics are retro using a digitized style that I really admire. Each room is detailed without large, overbearing paragraphs of text. Although some of its English has grammatical issues, nothing serious and it certainly isn't going to spoil the fun.

The parser interaction is excellent, allowing exploration using the usual commands to look, examine, get, drop, open, etc. Including the usual compass directions to get around. Each command can be shortened: 'L' to look, 'X' to examine. In fact, examining everything is never a bad idea nor is asking for help.

The characters you meet are few but full of... character! The butler appears to have spent his lifetime pottering about the house so quite useless. Dorwinion isn't exactly a nice guy by the looks of it but I liked Shadow's sense of humour. Oh, and there's a nasty cat. I don't like cats because they only use you for food! And then there's the gnome - what a crazy tale he represents and is nothing more than a lunatic. You'll see!

This may well be a short adventure but, it's full of curiosity, investigation and alternative humour. Yes, the story is insane, without any realism, and I loved that. Do not be too quick to dismiss this excellent adventure.

Let's take a much-needed break from the boring text for a screenshot...

In fact, I wish I would listen to my own advice! Make sure you look under every stone.

A bit of background

As I enjoyed the adventure, I messaged Dwalin about it, the story, and how it came about...

"This is really a very short adventure, and that is why I chose it to be my first experience in translation. I am fond of text adventures since the 80s, where I played most of the commercially published adventures in Spain. I also had Gilsoft's PAWS, the program (or parser) that allowed you to create adventures for Spectrum, and I published a first homebrew adventure for that in 1993.

In Spain, fans of this type of game grouped together in various clubs, the most important of which one of them was CAAD, which published a bimonthly fanzine. Over time the clubs evolved into pages and internet forums, and the adventures of text as well, adapting to more modern computers. Contests were held on https://www.caad.es and players and adventure creators shared comments.

In 2005, using another adventure creation engine, Superglús, the evolution of the old PAWS, I published my second adventure: “The Adventures of Rudophine Rur”, and in 2015 using NgPAWS, another evolution of the engine. Rudolphine Rur tells the story of a little forest gnome who must enter the human world in search of his brother kidnapped by evil elves.

With the passage of time, the love for retrocomputing and old computers grew in Spain. I discovered this hobby in 2019. In Spain, the most important company that published text adventures in the 80s and 90s was AD Adventures. This company used as an adventure creation engine a parser called DAAD, also an evolution of the PAWS, but whose main feature was that it could port the games to most of the main systems of the time: Spectrum, Amstrad, MSX, Commodore 64, Amstrad PCW, PC MSDOS, Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.

Andrés Samudio, the director of Adventures AD released in 2014 the DAAD parser for use by the community of adventure creators. Until that moment DAAD had not been available to the general public, since it had been programmed exclusively for AD Adventures (it had a price of about € 12,000 in 1989!). The Spanish community of adventure creators began using DAAD to create cross-platform adventures for retro computers. In my case, I dedicated myself to porting my old Rudolphine Rur adventure to this system, and finally (2020) it was published (https://www.rudolphinerur.com) for most of the existing computers in the late 80s. I even published a small physical print run in cassette or floppy disk for Spectrum, Amstrad, MSX2 and Atari ST.

A year later I also wanted to try another parser, from the early 90s, SINTAC, another evolution of PAWS, which generated adventures for MSDOS. With him, I created a very short adventure, which I set in the same world as Rudolphine Rur: "The errand boy" being a prequel to it. The adventure was published in May 2021 in its PC version. Later I ended up porting it to DAAD so that I could release versions for Spectrum, Amstrad and MSX2.

Until now all my adventures were only available in Spanish. I considered that "The errand boy", being a short adventure, could be a good candidate to be translated into English. My level of English is not very good, and I have mainly used the google translator. So I hope native English people can forgive if they see something "weird". Finally, shortly after finishing the translation, I ended up porting the adventure also to Atari ST and well, that's the one you're playing :-) "

A fascinating read which I hope you all enjoyed? I'm always impressed when a game like this appears on so many different platforms. My thanks to Dwalin for taking time out of his day to talk with me.

Okay, let's take another break from the reading for yet another screenshot...

I think Dorwinion deserves a slap for how he treats poor Galdrin!

The CryptO'pinion

It's always great to see new Atari ST games released. (Yet Another New Atari ST Game, just in case you wondered about the header above). This was a lot of fun to play; I loved its storytelling and really enjoyed playing through to the end. Okay, I wish it was a much bigger adventure, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the Atari ST version of Rudolphone Rur will get translated into English, someday very soon.

You can download the ST disk image from Dwalin's website, AtariMania, or by clicking this link.

Make sure you examine everything and leave no stone unturned. Or book.

The descriptions aren't longwinded yet provide all the details you require.

I guess that's one way to get his attention!

My gosh, there is so much information within this one screenshot! No spoilers!!

The style and unique storytelling is quite extraordinary.

Roll through this adventure as you would in real life.

I thought the later stages were a little too ambiguous at times. Maybe it's just me?

A small adventure that's big on content. I loved playing this!!

This last image is Rudolphine Rur running on the Atari ST (Spanish).

I'm hoping for the English version soon!