User Summary:
The Pawn was Magnetic Scroll's first published game. It tells the story of a contemporary British citizen who ends up in the mythical world of Kerovnia. The player's main goal is to escape, but there are lots of side quests, places to explore and mysteries to solve before being able to leave this place.
The Pawn is an interactive fiction game. There is a large world to explore, and a lot of characters to interact with, some of them quite strange, like a snowman or a magician disguised as an insane hermit. The game uses Magnetic Scrolls' text parser, which allowed complex sentences and implemented a rudimentary text editor (you could recall previous sentences and edit them). Several versions of the game included graphics and music (the Amiga version is one of the first games to use digitized sound samples for music).
The game came with a novella ("A tale of Kerovnia" by Georgina Sinclair) containing several gameplay hints in encrypted form (it was intended as a form of anti-piracy, as players needed both the game and the novella to get these hints).