Portugues
The Magic Toyshop
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About the game
You are hunting for a birthday present for your niece Isabelle. The big shops on Regent Street are loud and garish, so you wander down a dim Victorian arcade and step into a dusty little toyshop with a peeling rocking horse in the window. The owner is away today, and his daughter Catharine is looking after the place.
Catharine is happy to help, but in her own way: from an old oak chest she brings out one toy or game at a time, and each one is a small puzzle to solve before the next appears. Some are model kits and gadgets, some are pencil and paper games with a twist, and a few are knowing nods to famous puzzles from older adventure games. The whole game takes place in the shop.
Gareth Rees, who also wrote Christminster, entered The Magic Toyshop in the very first Interactive Fiction Competition, in 1995, and described it as "a fun game for all the family". It has no villains and no way to die, just a counter and a pile of things to fiddle with.
Playing it here
Click Play now and the story starts in the player. Type a command after the >
prompt and press Enter. The game is in English and understands short sentences
that start with a verb, such as examine chest or take the box. Some puzzles
are drawn with ASCII characters; if they look odd on a small screen, type
plain to switch to plain text.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
look (l) |
describe the shop again |
examine (x) something |
look closer at a toy or a puzzle |
take, open, push, turn, play something |
the everyday actions the puzzles rely on |
ask Catharine about a puzzle |
ask the shopkeeper's daughter for a hint, once you have tried it yourself |
inventory (i) |
list what you are carrying |
score |
your progress, out of 20 |
plain / pretty |
turn the ASCII drawings off or on |
help |
about the game |
save / restore |
keep your progress in this browser and load it back |
A few things worth knowing
Talk to Catharine. She decides what you get to play with next, and once you have had a real go at a puzzle she is willing to drop a hint.
One puzzle at a time. New toys only come out of the chest when you are ready for them, so focus on what is in front of you.
Examine everything twice. Boxes have labels, games have rules printed on them, and the details usually matter.
Many of these puzzles are classics. If something looks familiar from a puzzle book, your old tricks may still work, though not always in the way you expect.
Credits and licence
The Magic Toyshop was written by Gareth Rees for the 1995 Interactive Fiction Competition. The version served here is Release 1 (serial 951018), the post-competition file kept by the IF Archive. The author released the game as free software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or any later version. The licence text and the source code of this release are linked from this page.