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In the past year, Iadvd has entered the world of "retro" development with some titles authored with the first edition of Mojon Twins's Churrera. His latest game, Moon And The Pirates, is the sequel to Moon's Fandom Festival, and like that title, is a dynamic adventure where you need to interact with a group of non-playing characters, in order to keep going on in the story until the end.

The protagonist is Moon, a girl who accidentally ended up on a pirate galleon. They seize her ferry ticket and put it in the treasure chest. Moon will have to convince them to be a true pirate, in order to obtain the key to the chest, reach Coconut Island and go back by ferry. By collecting information scattered around the place, looking for objects and above all talking with non-playing characters - there are seven of them, each with their own personality and interests - Moon will have to win their respect. When all the pirates will have the highest consideration of our friend, indicated by a series of icons placed at the top of the screen whenever she is close to each character, Moon will be able to open the chest.

The game was created with a custom version, modified by the author, of the Churrera MK1: it can be noted, in particular, that the sprites are larger than those normally manageable with that tool. Moon And The Pirates reminds of a simplified version of the Magic Knight games created by David Jones for Mastertronic in the 80's, with a greater emphasis on dialogues, rather than on the manipulation of objects, which should only be given to pirates, in order to increase their favour towards us. The playing area is small but fairly well represented; each pirate is immediately recognizable. Sound on the other hand, apart from a short tune in the initial menu, is almost absent.

Moon And The Pirates is characterized by little action and a lot of text to read. It is long, perhaps too long, and can be somewhat repetitive. There is no possibility to save the state of affairs, which under emulation is not a big problem, but on a real machine it is.

For these reasons the game may not be suitable for everyone. But it is also true that this sort of game, at least insofar as in the library of Spectrum games, is quite uncommon. So it's worth trying in any case, more so if you like the genre.