13th Scale

*Limited edition of 120 copies* We had met the mysterious DS composer called 13th Scale on the occasion of the HDK Dungeon-synth magazine n. 2; we were bewitched by the spell of his music, so much so that we proposed that he make an entire album for us. So XIII has extricated himself in the crazy heroic-fantasy world told in "Shinderg's Tomb" and composed seventeen tracks full of sense of wonder.

It is 2058 AD, though you could be forgiven for forgetting that, as mid-21st century Earth looks so much like a generic fantasy world with a strange and charming psychedelic taste. With Geo-Humanity threatened by the armies of Zartog, the last surviving member of the Inter-Sector Brotherhood (that's you) must travel to each of the four zones of the world to collect the four quarters of the Key of Peace.

Guided by a strange poem spoken by Shinderg, “Supreme God of the New World”, you must visit each sector in the right order, confronting all-kind foes and inane riddles before the final climax. Will be you successful in this Quest?

In the 80s there was the boom of the so-called "gamebooks", interactive books usually of the fantasy genre, in which the reader was called to make choices and solve puzzles to reach the last page.

Proteus, a magazine released in the UK from 1984 to 1988, published a whole interactive adventure to play in each issue: they were naive dungeon explorations, treasure searches full of sense of bizarre, weird riddles and absurd monsters.

Proteus's adventures weren't masterpieces, but they were fun and damn difficult: there were often dozens of objects to necessarily find to complete the quest and defeat the final monster, and most of the time the decisive one was missing; furthermore, it was essential to draw maps ogf the dungeons in order not to get lost in the paragraphs, but these maps often... did not add up.