Black Cauldron: Point and Click

Black Cauldron: Point and Click is not a new game but a fan rebuild of Sierra's mid-eighties adventure based on Disney's The Black Cauldron. The original ran on the AGI engine; this version is assembled in the later SCI engine, and the one thing that really changes is how you tell the game what you want to do.

You play Taran, an assistant pig-keeper responsible for the oracular pig Hen Wen, who has to be kept away from the Horned King. The original was already unusually welcoming for its time: Sierra dropped typed commands and replaced them with function keys for choosing an item, using it, looking and interacting. The remake takes that one step further and gives you an icon bar for walk, look, talk and use, so the whole game is played with the mouse.

Graphics and story remain Sierra's own. That means a cartoon world with characters from the film, a short running time, and a structure that branches: whether Hen Wen is captured, how you finally deal with the cauldron and which reward you accept all change the outcome. There are several endings, and the game never tells you that you just walked through a lesser one.

The conversion works no miracles. If Sierra adventures leave you cold, this is still an uneven licensed game where you can die without warning and where you do a lot of walking. If you always meant to play it but bounced off the old controls, this is the most comfortable version that exists, and you no longer need to remember which key did what.

On oldgame.cz it starts directly in the browser, with no installation.