Kayleth - a rare game based on the books by Isaac Asimov

March 29, 2021, 14:11 Mikhail Sudakov ред.

Despite Isaac Asimov's enormous worldwide popularity, his books have rarely become the basis for computer and video games. Yes, 1984 saw the release of Robots of Dawn, based on Robots of Dawn, and 1995 saw Robot City based on the novel series of the same name, written, though not by Asimov himself, but under his keen guidance. We can also mention some quests from the Level 9 studio, whose plots were clearly inspired by the writer's works, and a wonderful text quest Kayleth by Adventure Soft.

It was released in 1986 on ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and BBC Micro, and was supposed to be released on Amstrad CPC and IBM PC, but in the end U.S. Gold did not work out with these versions. Kayleth was released under the auspices of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and the game was supposed to be just the first of a series. Alas, and these plans were not destined to come true, although critics liked the quest very much, and ordinary players were delighted.

The story, written by Stefan F. Ufnowski, is about the planet Ziron, which was home to a very peaceful civilization. However, then a tyrant named Caylet came to the planet and enslaved it with his army of androids. The planet's inhabitants were sent to the mines to mine the valuable mineral Chromazin. You play the role of one of these miners, who is finally tired of living in slavery. You decide to escape from the planet, but suddenly come to your senses on a conveyor belt - immobile and without memory of how it happened to you. Well, you have to get out of this mess, and you can't just walk away from Ziron - you'll have to personally kill the tyrant who took over the planet!

Kayleth combines a lot of good text with great animated graphics. The game isn't the easiest, but it's very entertaining, especially if you like sci-fi literature. As Commodore Plus/4 owners never got their version, 35 years later Canadian Csabo took upon himself to fix the situation - he ported Kayleth to this computer and improved it a bit: he made graphics and text faster, annihilated some bugs, slightly re-drawn the splash screen, and even added one new command to the language engine (we'll need it closer to the finale).

As a result Kayleth is played better than before, so if you don't mind the muted color scheme of Commodore family computers and you haven't played this masterpiece before you can start your acquaintance with this port. Download the game from either Plus/4 World or "Perfect Pixel".