Inside Outing

A 1988 Commodore 64 adventure from the British developer Edge Games, released under The Edge label. The catalogue records a third-person viewpoint and single-player play.

The British scene of the late eighties had its own conception of the adventure game, quite distinct from the American text school. Instead of typing commands, you controlled a character directly in space, moving through the rooms of a building, gathering objects, combining them and working out how to progress. The puzzles are spatial and item-based rather than conversational, which put a premium on observation and on remembering where things were.

The format carried specific constraints on Commodore 64 hardware. Each room was effectively a separate screen, and moving between them meant a load, which disk versions handled comfortably and cassette versions much less so. Designers had to account for that and lay out environments to minimise how often a player would need to backtrack.

For a modern player the main obstacle is the absence of guidance. The game does not explain its objective or what the collected items are for, and assumes you are keeping notes. That was standard in 1988, when a printed manual and background fiction came in the box, material that no longer accompanies an emulated disk image.

You can play it directly in the browser here on OldGame.cz, which is the simplest way to see what a late eight-bit British adventure looked like without hunting down a disk image and configuring an emulator.