Denarius Avaricius Sextus

Year 1992, a CRT monitor glowing in your face and a pile of floppies on your desk. Sierra, LucasArts—everyone knew those names. But Thorsoft? Hardly anyone digs up that name these days, yet this British studio quietly churned out text adventures with more personality than many of their more famous competitors.

Denarius Avaricius Sextus is the first game in the so-called Avvy series and takes place in ancient Rome in 79 AD. You play as a Roman named Avaricius—a man whose name immediately tells you that nobility is probably not his strong suit. Setting a game in the ancient world was fresh back then; Sierra was swinging swords and spaceships, but here it's all togas and denarii.

This is a classic text adventure in the British school tradition—you type commands on the keyboard, move through locations, collect items, and solve puzzles. The parser handles a solid vocabulary, though you'll occasionally wrestle with it more than with the game itself. That's par for the course with this genre, really. Humor is present and intentional—the game doesn't take itself seriously, and that suits it well. A few moments will genuinely make you laugh, and a few others will have you staring at the ceiling for a while.

What I remember most about the series is the atmosphere of scrappy pride. Thorsoft wasn't a big studio with a big budget, yet their games had character. Avaricius ages the way text adventures typically do—graphics are minimal, the parser sometimes won't understand what you want, and puzzles sometimes rely on logic only the author would understand. On the flip side: this type of game simply doesn't bore you the way a bad 3D engine does. Text stays text.

These days Denarius Avaricius Sextus will appeal mainly to those who want something off the beaten path. If Sierra and LucasArts have bored you with their museum-piece fame and you want an adventure that never made it into any canon—this is exactly the kind of mystery for an afternoon. Runs fine in your browser or via DOSBox, and the barrier to entry is minimal. Just know English and have patience for a nineties parser.