Sword Quest 1: The Search is a single-player, keyboard controlled, fantasy role-playing game.
The player’s role is that of court jester to the King of Ferd. An evil warlock has unleashed a horde of nasty creatures upon the land, dragons, griffin, goblins etc and you have been commissioned to venture forth and vanquish the aforementioned warlock, trouble is you start your quest without weapons or armour so best avoid and fighting until better equipped, armour & weapons can be found in caves etc or bought in towns.
The game starts by creating a character, the game will assign skill points to the three categories of strength, skill and dexterity. The player can re-roll the dice as it were until they find a combination that they are happy with at which point they name their character and start the game.
All gameplay takes place on a single screen. In the upper right is a window showing the character in the landscape, below this and of equal size is the NGS logo. In the upper left is the rectangular dialogue box in which conversations are conducted and other in-game information is displayed. The mid left holds two smaller windows one shows the basic keyboard commands while the other shows the character statistics. In the lower left is the fight window, initially this shows the game’s title but when the player starts moving around it shows the enemy that has just been encountered.
What this means is that the player moves their character around the landscape but has to watch the fight window to see if they’ve run into anything nasty and the dialogue window to see how many hit points they take from an opponent (or lose to said adversary).
There are some basic sound effects in the game but there is no auto-save.
