The Sword of Malice

War! The word you first knew, and the reason you live today. For a thousand years your people, the Sekoniun, have waged a war against the Altari.

And so begins your journey in the prequel story to Panuccio Production's short film Dark Blood. This time, however, the setting has been changed to a fantasy setting. A setting much more suited to the Dark Blood universe. This project was completed during my Game Design course at University.

Set an untold number of years before the film, this interactive fiction game features an original story that places you in the footsteps of a Sekoniun warrior on a quest to find and create the ultimate weapon that will aid the Sekoniun cause and end the war with the Altari once and for all.

In The Sword of Malice you must guide your character through multiple puzzles and locations by using text-based commands. These commands are used to control your character and as such are usually verbs. Some basic commands used throughout the game are NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST, EXAMINE, GET, DROP, INVENTORY, HIT, OPEN.

There are many puzzles in the game and even more ways to solve them. The game also has multiple game endings, so make sure you play it a good number of times to see them all. There is also NPC interaction in the game, i.e. there are instances during the game where you can talk with other characters to further learn about the story and also to aid in your quest.

Instructions:

Download the Windows Frotz interpreter. This is the program that allows you to play interactive fiction games. Simply extract all the files into a directory on your computer.
Download the Sword of Malice game file.
Double-click the game file (or alternatively open it from Windows Frotz) to get the game started.
Enjoy!

If you should get stuck, there is a walkthrough available. But I strongly urge you to try and complete the game without the aid of the walkthrough.

To learn more about interactive fiction, have a look at The Interactive Fiction Archive.