GoldenPath 02

Golden Path is one of the first contextually driven point and click games, with hand drawn pixel art, and some simple puzzles. This was all quite advanced for 1986, so lets check this out. Production Notes: Captured: 24th May 2026 Narrated: 27th August 2026 Edited: Sept 2026 Im not joking! Back in the UK in 1986, the scene was awash with ZX and C64 text-based adventure games. They were ubiquitous, and anybody could write one in BASIC, even me. Graphics back then were mainly limited due to the resolutions of those machines, which often became more limited when using multicolour graphics modes. I remember seeing images of The Pawn (Amiga) and Defender of the Crown in magazines, and thinking I had witnessed the future. It made my silly old C64k machine look like it came from the 1970s, when the VIC-20 only came out in 1982, just 4 years prior to this game! The game come up in a database search or some random review, and I wondered how I had never played it yet. Looking at the longplay, it seemed simple enough, but I instantly forgot most of it by the time I started the recorder. Trying to follow the longplay also meant I didnt read the scroll very often to find out what I was supposed to be doing. This is how someone who was familiar with the game would play it anyway, but probably without the wandering about and getting lost. When I came to record the narration, I was suffering from a shop alarm which was going off for hours, and car alarms and other stuff. When there was a gap in the alarms, I started the recorder, but the microphone was dead and didnt capture my full voice. The alarms came back after 6 mins of recording, so I had to pause the video and wait for them to end, and then BEEP my way back into the narration to continue. I tried to recover the audio after recording it, but it still sounds very bassy and not at all what it should have sounded like. Luckily this issue only affected 2 or 3 videos this series, but I still have 4 more to narrate as of now. The audio sounds better with headphones. Danscore: This must have looked (and maybe even sounded) like a work of art back when the Amiga was around 1 year old. Some of the screens are of different quality, but the good ones mean this stands out by a mile compared to the Infocom adventures, and anything Sierra had to offer until at least Kings Quest 4 in 1988, and I would suggest this game still looks better. The intuitive interface and control system seems obvious and natural now, but in those day even the use of a mouse was brand new to us. The Secret of Monkey Island still used a set of verbs to control the actions in 1990, and that still used text instead of inventory icons. The premise is to wander around the landscape, helping people and solving small puzzles. Nothing complicated like: LEVER THE BOULDER WITH THE RAKE AND THE HOE like in The Pawn. The ability to click to instantly throw items seems almost unique to this game?, but is rarely used. Some puzzles like dropping a hedgehog to distract the dog seems as far fetched as I can imagine, but many seem simple enough, like the Jail Key and Apple with the Goat. I believe a dedicated player could discover all of the depths after about a week of tries, which harms replay value, but infocom games took ages perhaps due to wrestling with the parser. In general I have respect for what this tried to go, not only on the Amiga but also on the Amstrad CPC as well. This could even be the game with the first speech SFX on the Amiga, even if it is only "Ha-Yah!". Sadly, the game seems quite thin compared to the aforementioned games, but Im sure it gets nostalgia points for those who played it. I will give this 6 out of 10. It seems amazing from the outside, but speed runners can probably beat the whole thing in less than an hour. What is left is nothing compared to Lure of the Temptress or Monkey Island etc, but it does have a strange and unique atmosphere thanks to the music and characters.