Forest of Doom - front cover of the 52 page manual
Forest of Doom is a game that it's author D. Bruce Moore started as a teenager back in June of 1983, but dropped it for other projects at the time. The project was resurrected & added to (including a machine language helper routine for player input) starting in the fall of 2016, and released the following year. Bruce did many innovative marketing things for this game; making several teaser trailer videos with self-composed music and voices, including modern original music files to be played in the background from a PC or portable device while playing the game as a mood setting device, having various kinds of merchandise (T-shirts & hoodies, a custom coffee cup prize for the first person to complete the game), an intricate booth display for the game shown at the annual CocoFests, and having a full 52 page manual with a color cover. Another innovation - you order the manual (from modern digital press company lulu.com), and you receive the manual in the mail along with details on how to get the digital download of the game itself. The manual also includes many illustrations and is one of the best ones written for the Coco market - even including manuals done back in the Coco's heyday in the 1980's.
The game itself is large map, turn based RPG / adventure game, with some semi-graphics mixed in along with little musical bits when various things happen, with 3 levels of play. The players' goal is to recover the king's sceptre from the Forest of Doom. You have a mini map in the upper left corner that you move your character through, with some terrain being impassible, and can travel between mini-map screens. You are able to enter some places (inn's, etc.) which sometimes contain hints, and you also encounter a variety of monsters along the way, which you can choose to fight, run from or bribe (and once you learn the relative strengths of the monsters, your strategy will change). In this way, it is low resolution version of popular games like the original Ultima series. Monsters of course can carry gold, but some also carry special items that you will need to complete your quest. A very well done game for BASIC.
Title: Forest of Doom
Author: D. Bruce Moore
Publisher: D. Bruce Moore
Released: 2017
Requires: Color Computer 1,2,3, 32K RAM, disk.
Click here for the official website with information and a link near the top to order.