THE HERMITOriginal Title

THE HERMIT brings a full 1980s text adventure to the ColecoVision, powered by Amy Studio.
A hermit living in the hills has disappeared, and under his cabin lie abandoned mines, an underground river, a hidden village, a sunken ship, a burial chamber and a spaceship waiting to launch.
Find the ten treasures, outwit the bear, the mummy, the black leopard, the demon and the sphinx, bring everything aboard the ship and blast off for a perfect 200 points.
No typing and no keypad: every command is chosen from joystick menus showing only what you can see or carry.
Every place has its own picture, and the pictures change as you act: push the refrigerator, open the trapdoor, mend the track, hang the rope, open the sarcophagus.

Ported from Eric Bryant’s listing in COMPUTE! magazine, November 1987.



Details

56 locations, 67 objects, 10 treasures, 29 verbs; the complete original story and puzzles.
Nearly 52 KB of text, rules, and graphics packed into a 32 KB cartridge:
9.4 KB of text stored in 5.9 KB with a nested dictionary
every rule of the original BASIC game compiled into 1.7 KB of bytecode for a Z80 adventure engine
23 painted location pictures (1,373 tiles) ZX0-packed from 27 KB into 11.6 KB
Creatures appear as sprites over the pictures; the leopard and the demon are magnified.
Original music, sound effects and a blinking, chiming MORE prompt for long texts.


AI disclaimer
Entirely done by Claude Opus 5.5 and refined through compilation, emulation and QA gameplay testing.