Project-X - The Microman

Project-X: The Micro Man was published by the British house Compass Software in 1985 and is an illustrated text adventure for the 48K ZX Spectrum. It is credited to Jon R. Lemmon and Tim Kemp; Compass Software was a small but fairly prolific label that specialised in adventures and stuck with them even as the market tilted towards arcade games.

The game is the first part of the Micro Man trilogy. The O Zone and The Micro Mutant followed, so if the story clicks there is somewhere to go next — not something Spectrum adventures could usually promise. Alongside the Spectrum it also appeared on the Amstrad CPC and the BBC Micro.

What to expect in practice: you type verb-noun commands, the game answers in text, and some locations come with an illustration. It does not hold your hand. The vocabulary is limited, and a good share of the entertainment (or the suffering, depending on temperament) lies in finding the phrasing the parser will accept. Saving often and keeping a paper map are mandatory equipment in this genre, because death can arrive without warning and without a way back.

One telling number: the user score in the ZXDB database sits above 7.5 out of ten for this title. For a small adventure from an independent label that is respectable and suggests it found its audience among genre fans.

The recommendation is therefore a narrow one. If you like classic mid-eighties British text adventures and do not mind wrestling a limited parser, this is one of the better small titles of its era. If you have never played a text adventure, do not start here — start with Infocom and come back once the puzzles stop feeling arbitrary.