The Books of Tarotia, Book 1: Restoring the Cups

When that wooden book first appears on screen and begins to turn, you know something serious is about to unfold. The Books of Tarotia is no casual tarot card adventure, but an ambitious 1994 adventure that attempts to merge mysticism with logic puzzles. The first installment is called Restoring the Cups, and it's exactly the kind of game someone who got lost in a casino playing cards of fate probably shouldn't have made—yet someone did.

The game plunges you into a world where your task is to restore four groups of tarot cards. Cups is the first of them. You move across the screen like in a classic point-and-click adventure, exploring environments and collecting items. Nothing revolutionary, nothing you haven't seen in Sierra games or LucasArts classics. But while those dealt with pirates or space travel, here someone sat down and thought: why not tarot and rather abstract fantasy?

It plays slowly. The graphics are built on everything being hand-drawn with a color palette limited to sixteen colors. Walking, character animations, environments—it all has a certain charm that wears thin over time. The puzzles aren't hard, more like little logic exercises. You collect things, combine them, use them in a certain order. Dialogues aren't voiced, just text you have to read.

Tarotia is apparently a game that came too early and for too narrow an audience. It wasn't a bestseller that crossed boundaries, and today you'll find it only in old game archives. Still, it's an honest piece of work from someone who believed that mysticism and computer games could work together. The idea wasn't bad, the execution was solid, but the competition was stronger.

Today you can play it in a browser or emulator if you're interested in truly obscure gems from nineties game development. It won't change your life, but it's an interesting historical note showing how the nineties experimented with making games about everything imaginable. Mystics and point-and-click fans with patience for experimentation might find something here.