A new text adventure for the 40-year old Amstrad CPC makes us happy

Back in 1984, my family got our first home computer – An Amstrad CPC, and it shaped, ultimately, my entire career from then on in as a professional games journalist. Back in the day, besides games like Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, one of my favourite types of games to play were text adventures from classic Infocom titles such as Zork and the more risque Leather Goddesses of Phobos, to less known, but still amazing titles such as Jewels of Babylon and After Shock from Interceptor Micros. I still have these games in my retro collection to this day.

As frustrating as they could be with their massive lack of hints and clues most of the time, the slow progress of working your way through them, sketching hand-drawn maps on bits of paper, and tearing your hair out at obtuse puzzles passed many an after-school hour for my brother and me.

So, when I discovered a new text-based adventure for my trusty CPC some 41 years after I first booted one up, well, that’s exciting news. Say hello to Hexacpucchu, discovered by Indie Retro News.

“Hexapucchu was created in 15 days. This game was born from an old (but very persistent) desire to create by myself an adventure game in the spirit of Devilry II, which I had programmed in my youth, back in 1989. Thus, on July 18, 2025, I decided to design the very first screen of the game. It was the title screen. I was still on vacation for one more week by the sea, and I took advantage of this suspended moment in time to work intensively. The screens followed one after another, and even though the main outlines were already sketched, the storyline took shape gradually, almost instinctively”, so says the programmer who goes by the name of Titan.

Where Hexapuccho differs slightly from the games I was talking about earlier is that here, you aren’t typing in commands, but rather selecting from choices presented, menu style, like the Fighting Fantasy type books of the same period. So instead of typing Go South, here you may press Option 1, Go South.

The graphics and music are really good, and the fact that this was put together in just 15 days highlights the love the programmer has for the subject matter. You can check out Hexapuccho in the video above, and the ROMs are available for download on the Amstrad Museum. From there, you can run them in the CPC emulator of your choice, or, if you are me and next-level nerdy, play them on an original Amstrad CPC via a Gotek drive and a USB drive.