The Yawn

Published on Golden Disk 64 11/90

Today's game is The Yawn, a German text adventure illustrated with 36 multicolor pictures. It takes place in a decidedly weird fantasy realm and provides a ton of humorous text that doesn't always hit the mark and sometimes veers into rather questionable territory.

The colorful title screen is conspicuously abstract and manages not to reveal anything about the game. It's well-drawn, but nothing about it says fantasy to me. The catchy tune playing in the background also does its best not to evoke any medieval vibes at all. It's possible that the title logo and the music were commissioned before anybody really knew what The Yawn would be about. It's also possible that this was done on purpose since The Yawn is meant to be a parody and not a straight-faced fantasy story.

The name is a reference to Magnetic Scrolls' The Pawn (1986), which is also a text adventure with graphics that similarly plays in an off-kilter fantasy world. Aside from that, the two games do not share much in common, thus I will refrain from constantly comparing one with the other.

The Byteriders consisted of two people, Sebastian Broghammer and Steve Kups, who had previously created Logan, another text adventure (with graphics) in a similar style to The Yawn. The game graphics were contributed by Thomas Heinrich and Michael Detert, both members of X-Ample Architectures.

CONTENT WARNING This game's German text comes with a style of humor that can be rather crude at times, and the jokes occasionally go into somewhat controversial directions. You may encounter some potentially offensive content in this article that is not to everyone's tastes.

With that out of the way, let me be a responsible player and press F3 to load the instructions first.

Disk access is initiated with this neat color-cycling effect, and the music continues while the instructions are being loaded.

Okay, a crumbly scroll of paper is definitely something I'd associate with fantasy. The music also switched to an apprehensive track that wouldn't sound out of place at the start of an epic wizard duel. The tension only lasts for a couple of patterns, though, and then the melody becomes amazingly upbeat, which pretty much reflects the game's flippant setting.

Contrary to what their name might suggest, I don't think scrolls have the actual ability to display scrolling text on them. It's a neat effect, though, and I can adjust the scroll speed with the joystick.

It might not look it, but this part makes use of a neat technical trick: The scrolling text consists exclusively of sprites. With extensive application of sprite multiplexing, a grand total of 64 sprites is displayed on the screen at once in a grid of 8x8: I shaded the individual sprites here. As you can see, each sprite row can fit two lines of text. The small gaps between the rows make multiplexing a bit less time-critical. Even though only eight rows are visible, there are nine rows worth of pixel data stored in a continuous RAM block of 72 sprites (8x9). Whenever the top row of sprites leaves the visible area, the sprite data of that row is replaced with the text that will shortly after scroll in at the bottom. Since there are nine rows in the RAM, the text update does not have to be instantaneous.

The scroll text actually starts with the game's backstory, and it already sets the tone for the adventure pretty well:

nce upon a time, there was a common knight named Dirk who lived in a standard, pseudo-medieval fantasy realm called Derogwania. All was well in the kingdom until man-sized killer bunnies arrived and ruined everyone's day. Even though he was largely known for being a coward, Dirk was the only one who dared to stand against the murderous rodents. To everyone's (including Dirk's) surprise, he managed to butcher the entire army of bunnies within half an hour. Later on, Dirk admitted that he had been acting under the influence of various non-specified drugs. Shortly after, the king called Dirk to the court and offered the accidental hero the hand of his daughter, Princess Gwendolyne. There was a catch, though. To prove his worth once more, Dirk had to go into the Royal Dungeon, kill the giant who illegally lived there, and bring the giant's head to the king as proof.

The rest of the instructions then goes into detail about how to interact with the game. Compared to Price of Peril, the adventure game I looked at previously, The Yawn has a more sophisticated parser that understands full (German) sentences and not just two-word commands. It doesn't have the large vocabulary of Infocom's games, and there are still some situations where you have to guess the correct verb, but it's pretty advanced for a text adventure on the C64.

Now that we know the nature of our noble quest, let us start the game.

Here's a first on this blog: The Yawn is a game that takes up both sides of the floppy disk, and I've just been asked to turn the disk around.

This is also the point where my memories of the game stop. Not because I suppressed the whole experience for some traumatic reason, but because my (legitimately bought) copy had a faulty disk that wouldn't load the actual game. Many years later I played through The Yawn on an emulator with the extensive help of a walkthrough. If I had played this as a twelve-year-old, my reactions to certain scenes and my overall opinion of the game certainly would have been different to what you're going to read here.

The first room appears with a slick vertical wipe and the text description scrolls in as well. The game starts in the king's throne room. The monarch is sitting on his royal chair, flanked by two scowling guards. The text lets me know that the guard to the left is just there so the guard to the right doesn't feel lonely.

Due to the way the people are colored in this picture I can't help but think they are more or less naked. Especially the guards seem to be wearing nothing more than their helmets, and I can't unsee those single pixels in each guard's lower torso as belly buttons.

The room description also tells me that the only exit is to the south and all I can see of note is a throne, despite there also being the king and his guards. The list of what I can see is a bit odd, as it categorically ignores people.

Since this is the first room, let me try out some commands just to see how responsive the game is:

• If I talk to the king, he dismissively tells me to hurry up and go kill that giant in the dungeon.
• Sitting on the throne (and thus on the king's lap) is not an option, as the game doesn't understand "sit" as a command.
• However, I can try to kill the king. I expected the guards to interfere, but instead the sudden rush of adrenaline makes my weak heart explode before I even get to attack the ruler.
• If I'd like to kiss the king, the game tells me that it will ignore my command out of fear that the German BPS might claim The Yawn to be harmful to young people. That seems a bit excessive for a simple kiss, but there is some unintended irony to this joke. More on that later.

Going south triggers a disk access in order to load the next room's bitmap graphics. The above animation shows how long it takes to switch from one room to another. This is the usual downside of adventures with graphics on the C64. If all the images don't fit into the RAM (they did in Price of Peril), then they have to be loaded from disk which makes walking from room to room a bit of a slog.

Speaking of loading times, I'm now in the waiting room, appropriately enough. The game isn't sure if the room is actually used for waiting at all and muses that, to know for sure, one would have to ask the programmers. This won't be the last time the fourth wall gets deliberately ignored.

To the north and east is the dining hall which is currently occupied by a bored-looking court jester. I ask him to tell me a joke, but my request isn't dignified with an answer. Instead, the jester accuses me of being a software pirate and demands that I open the paper manual to find the eleventh word in paragraph seven of page thirty-four. There is no physical manual, so it doesn't matter what I answer. Since the jester can't prove whether I'm playing an illegitimate version or not, he just asks me to delete all cracks and then hands me a key. Did I mention this game's humor is a bit odd?

If I now talk to the jester again, he continues suspecting me to be a digital thief and gives me a lockpick as well, because that makes sense. Unfortunately, the puzzles can be as weird as the jokes at times.

The next person I meet is a wizard who isn't particularly fond of my company either. On the contrary, he threatens to turn me into a triple user port adapter if I don't leave immediately. The horror!

There is a magic key here that is referred to as "Zauberkey" which is neither English nor German. I guess "Zauberschlüssel" would've been too long to type repeatedly. What happens if I try to pick it up? Unsurprisingly, the wizard gets rather cross and turns me into a frog. All the items in my inventory, namely the joker key, the lockpick, and my axe, clatter to the ground. As a frog, I'm unable to do anything except to hop from room to room. If I try to leave the castle, the wizard appears and summons an invisible barrier. Since there is nowhere else to go, I make my way into the Royal Garden to the west.

The local pond comes with the obligatory frog who recognizes me as a fellow amphibian and promptly starts talking to me. He tells me that some stork just stole his crown and that he's hungry, too. If I help him with both problems, he would be eternally grateful for my noble deeds. That's not true, actually. He simply demands that I do these things for him and then tells me to hop off. Everyone in this adventure is required to act like a dick toward me, it seems. After that conversation, the spell wears off and I turn back to my regular self.

While I'm in here, I might as well look around a bit. The garden consists of several rooms, and their descriptions go a bit rampant. One room features an unsubtle Star Trek reference, and the next contains an even less subtle allusion to Dirk's apparent habit of snorting cocaine when nobody is watching. The room description in the northwest mentions that this is the upper left corner of the game, which is genuinely helpful if you are drawing a map.

To the east is a pavilion which causes the protagonist to have a confused religious experience that culminates in nothing happening. I can pick up a "Loserkey" here, though. If I examine it, the game muses that somebody must have lost it, hence the name. Did I mention this game's humor is a bit odd? Oh, I did? Good.

There is nothing going on in the Royal Bedchamber, and even if there were, the game points out it wouldn't dare describe it out of fear of getting an x-rating. Yeah, right. Keep this fake coyness in mind for later.

There is a crumpled suit of armor here that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be an inflatable doll made of rubber. Naturally, I'm taking that thing with me.

The Music Room features a piano that I can play (badly) and a purple door that is apparently locked. Curiously, the keyhole is an "object" I can interact with, which is usually a clue that it is essential to the game somehow. I try to peek through it, but I can't see anything because the key is blocking the view from the other side. For now, I can't do anything in here, so I leave.

The kitchen features a cook of undetermined origin who yells at me in broken German. There are a lot of flies here that I can just pluck out of the air.

After that, I go back to the pond and give the flies to the hungry frog. Except, I can't. If I want to give something to someone, the parser expects me to indicate a person. Sadly, the frog is treated as an object. Instead, I have to throw the flies. The frog is so distracted by the sudden influx of food that I can just pick it up and stuff it in my bag.

Wait, what am I even doing? I should stop faffing about and pursue my actual quest instead. I only have to kill a giant and bring his head to the king, after all.

To fulfill my duty, I have to briefly re-visit the wizard and retrieve the axe which I dropped when he turned me into a frog. I'll have my revenge for the wizard's deed soon, but first, there is a wicked titan waiting to be decapitated.

Winding stairs lead down into the Royal Dungeon, and as I enter, a gruesome scream echoes from the walls almost in stereo quality. Almost, because the C64's sound chip only plays in mono.

The dungeon's tense atmosphere is immediately sabotaged by the text description making a joke about a dead end that turns out to be a huge but easily removable sack. It's a pun on the German term for dead end which translates to "sack alley". Coincidentally, the previous issue of Golden Disk 64 also featured a game which used the exact same pun (see Gordian Tomb).

The dungeon consists of fourteen rooms that all use the same picture. The game still loads each room's graphics separately for some reason, even though they are all identical. I'd have appreciated a bit of optimization here, as this feels like a waste of time.

Except for the giant, there is nothing essential to be found in here. The rooms are mostly used for jokes, among them an Indiana Jones cameo, a reference to The Bard's Tale III, and the age-old tale about a fortune cookie containing a help message from a factory worker.

And here he is, the giant in all his oversized glory. At least that's what the text tells me, even though the picture is remarkably devoid of anything looking like a large person. In fact, this is the same image that is used for all the dungeon rooms. Come on, game, at least have the decency of showing me the adversary that will inevitably spell my doom.

Right, I'll just add my own giant in there.

There you go. And yes, that's a giant from the PC game Eye of the Beholder 2 which I borrowed to create this C64 version.

Since talking to the massive colossus does not bear any fruits (neither does kissing), I have no other choice but to kill him. Surprisingly, the giant keels over after only a single blow from my axe. Unfortunately, he directly falls onto my weapon and buries it underneath his gargantuan body. Damn, now I don't have anything to cut the head off. I guess I have to find a replacement for my axe somewhere else.

It's time to leave the castle and explore the nearby village. I have to say, I really like the room graphics of this game. Some pictures suffer a bit from weird perspectives or alarmingly deformed humans, but overall this is quite a treat for the eyes.

Graphical adventures used to be among the best-looking games on the C64 because their static, non-scrolling pictures could be large bitmaps without running into memory or performance problems.

The music by Markus Schneider is also very much worth a listen. There is only one track playing on loop during the game, but with a duration of over seven minutes, it doesn't feel repetitive. The tune starts with whimsical harpsichords and then transitions into full Sauron mode with an ominously rumbling bass and panicky strings. It culminates in a heroic fanfare that concludes with J.S. Bach's infamous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. It's basically the musical equivalent of the Hero's Journey.

Following the Royal Highway to the south leads me to the village's market square. The game gleefully informs me that during execution season the townfolks like to gather here and place bets on which way the death candidate's head is going to face once it has stopped rolling. The winner gets to spend a night with the innkeeper's daughter, and the loser a night with the innkeeper.

Dirk's attempt to enter the inn is almost thwarted by the entrance, but then he notices the "PULL" sign and stops banging his head against the door. Inside, he sits down and demands food, drink, and the innkeeper's wife. To Dirk's surprise, all of his requests are taken seriously, and he gets directed to an upstairs bedroom where said wife is waiting for him. Explicit scenes happen that the game once again does not describe any further. When Dirk comes back down, he mentions that the wife was a bit stiff, and the innkeeper replies that this is not surprising, considering that she's been dead for three days. Did I mention this game's... never mind.

This scene almost got The Yawn onto the index of the BPS. In an interview with Steve Kups, one of the game's authors, he describes how several parents were not at all amused watching their children play a game containing necrophilia jokes. CP Verlag, Golden Disk 64's publisher, received a lot of angry phone calls, and Steve Kups remembers getting an even angrier call from a CP Verlag representative who threatened to take legal action. Nothing happened, though, because the contract between the Byteriders and the publisher did not address this kind of issue. As a result, subsequent contracts would include a condition that allowed CP Verlag to penalize developers if they included inappropriate material in their software.

Moving swiftly on! The local blacksmith can be found to the east of the market square. According to the description, he is pounding a glowing piece of metal with his bare fist. But if you look at the image, you can see him holding a hammer. Which one is it, game? I demand clarity on this issue!

There is a sword here that would be ideal to cut through a giant's neck, but the blacksmith does not give away his workmanship for free. Since I don't have any money, he proposes a different kind of deal: He will hand me his sword if I get him a potency potion from the "Pimpfs", a tribe of gay dwarves (I'm not making this up) who live deep in the woods.

Further to the south and west is the home of Derogwania's last witch. She's the first person who doesn't immediately insult me as soon as she sees me. On the contrary, when I talk to her, she politely asks me to bring her a frog if I happen to come across one. As chance would have it, I caught one earlier which I can hand over now. In return, I get a "Hexenkey" (witch key) and a shabby-looking but still functional magic wand.

There is a hut at the southern end of the Royal Highway which turns out to be a branch office of Adventure Helpline Ltd. A human-sized rabbit absent-mindedly hands me some items and then shoves me out of the door, stating that it has to wait for Logan. This is a not-so-subtle reference to the Byteriders' previous game, Logan. Looking at my inventory reveals that I got a modern flashlight, a hamster, and a hose. The only useful item is the lamp. The hamster (which is a weapon to exterminate time agents) is another allusion to Logan, and the hose was allegedly intended for a different game. If I had to guess, probably for Maniac Mansion to get some gasoline into the chainsaw.

This is the Magical Forest of Derogwania. Nobody knows why it is called like that, and those who do probably never came back to tell anyone. I really like this room's picture with its mysterious light and the thin wafts of mist. It's too bad, then, that the same image is used for twenty-four other rooms. The forest is rather expansive and for no good reason. There are only four locations that need to be visited, everything else is just filler. Even the room descriptions get increasingly sarcastic about everything in this forest looking the same.

At one point I come across a dagger lying on the ground which I pick up. It's too small to hack off the giant's head, but it might have other uses, like backstabbing innocent NPCs.

Speaking of NPCs, in the south-west corner of the forest a gnome materializes out of nowhere and then looks at me with an embarrassed smile. If I talk to him, he asks me to build a snowman. There isn't any snow in the game, thus I cannot fulfill that request, even if I wanted to. I have to do something else, and I'll let you guess for a moment what it is.

No, it's not kissing him. I have to kill the gnome. There is no indication that he's evil in some way, except maybe for his strange snowman fetish. The text goes to great lengths to describe my cruel murder as if the game had let me any choice. It goes on telling me that a man chooses, a slave obeys and then hands me a golf club. Wait, wrong game.

Even the room picture changes to reveal the massacre I left behind. I have to say, The Yawn has some weird priorities. It can't be arsed to show the giant who is central to the plot, but it lavishly illustrates an inconsequential scene like this.

What was the point of this, you ask? Well, my vicious crime caused a plastic key (which is essential to finish the game) to appear in my inventory. Even the game shrugs its shoulders and just says it happened for no particular reason. Great.

A few or the forest rooms come with this image which features a bridge going across a river. Oh, and there is also a massive ringed moon dominating the black sky for some reason. The text gets sneaky and casually suggests that this forest might be endless. At the time it was rather common for adventure games to feature regions where one could get permanently stuck (e.g. in a forest or, more likely, a desert) because the rooms just endlessly looped in on themselves without any actual exits. Luckily, The Yawn isn't that cruel.

In the south-east corner of the forest I find the village of the Pimpfs. And they... wait, are they wearing condoms on their heads? The text describes the inhabitants as small blue dwarves, despite them not looking blue at all, who were formerly known by a different name. Of course, the game is alluding to the Smurfs, but just in case you missed the reference, the text continues by needlessly spelling out the joke. It then elaborates further that when the only female member of the community died, they all decided to turn to a gay lifestyle. Again, I'm just reporting what it says on the screen.

I talk to the closest Pimpf, and he agrees to give me a potency potion if I can bring him the hair of a giant. Well, it just so happens that I know one of these large chaps pretty well, and he likely won't protest if I cut off his mane. I just have to run back into the dungeon.

When it comes to gameplay issues, one of my biggest gripes stems from The Yawn's puzzles that force me to run across the entire map several times. The game has about 95 rooms, and going from the Pimpf village to the giant's home in the dungeon takes me through at least 28 rooms, each of them getting loaded from disk separately.

Back in the dungeon, the description keeps on telling me that I still have to kill the giant and at the same time claims that there is nothing in this room. Ace programming job there, guys.

Anyway, I have to cut off the giant's hair with the dagger, and that triggers another happy round of guess-the-verb. In the end, the accepted command, BENUTZE DOLCH MIT HAARE (USE DAGGER WITH HAIR) turns out to be quite simple. To my excuse, I am trained from Infocom adventures that "use" is not a valid verb because it is too unspecific.

Before I leave for the forest again, I think it's time for sweet revenge: I visit the wizard, whip out the magic wand I got from the witch, and turn the bearded codger into a shovel. Since I only retrieved my axe earlier, I gather up everything else that's lying around here. This includes the "Zauberkey" which caused the wizard to toadify me when I tried to take it. By now I'm carrying around five keys and a lockpick. I'm sensing some kind of pattern here.

Back in the forest, I come across a suspicious bump in the ground. Now that I have a shovel, I can dig up whatever is buried here. It turns out to be a parachute. What is this doing here? The game doesn't know either.

I find my way back to the Pimpf village and present the giant's hair to the Head Pimpf. He immediately glues it to his chest to increase his attraction stat by at least five points. In return, he hands me the promised potency potion and also mentions a treasure that is buried somewhere in the Pimpf village. Nobody has a shovel, so I hand over mine. Am I glad I visited the wizard earlier or I would've had to go back into the palace again.

After some excited digging, the Pimpfs unearth a chest that is filled with saucy underwear, whips, and other utensils for potentially dubious practices. For supplying the shovel, I get rewarded with a large, phallic key. Yay.

Now that I've got the potion, I could go right back to the blacksmith who requested it. But since this is an adventure game, I first wanted to try the potion myself. This resulted in a dramatic reprioritization of my body's blood circulation which caused me to stop living. Even though I could've predicted this fatal outcome, the description of it made me laugh more than I'd like to admit. A lot of the humor in this game can be dumb and juvenile, but it never feels mean-spirited to me. It's just a bunch of stupid jokes one guy wrote in his late teens (or early twenties) for a game that had to be finished in a couple of weeks.

As per our previous agreement, I deliver the potion to the blacksmith and he lets me have his sword.

Back in the dungeon, I test the sharpness of my newly acquired weapon by cutting off the giant's head.

Finally, I can prove my victory to the king by presenting him with the head of the recently deceased titan. The regent is delighted and assures me that I can now marry his daughter. However, there is a tiny problem: The princess has disappeared. The king found her chamber locked with a note stuck to the door saying that she had escaped to Derogwania's Dragon Region. Why she felt the need to flee the palace is never explained. Dirk is such an upstanding guy, why would she ever want to avoid marrying him?

Thus starts the last part of my quest. I have to find the king's daughter and bring her back safely to the palace. Although the text description doesn't mention it, I just got a visa from the king that allows me to enter Derogwania's Dragon Region (DDR) without getting shot at the border. DDR also happens to be the (German) acronym for the communist East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) which, at the time this game was created, was about to be dissolved and unified with West Germany.

Getting past the border control allows me to explore an area of 15 rooms that were previously blocked off.

Naturally, it isn't just smooth sailing from here on out. A couple of rooms further south, this heavily armed pink knight blocks my way. He isn't trying to kill me, but he will only let me pass if I beat him in a sword duel. The game outright tells me that there is zero chance of me winning, so I shouldn't even attempt to fight him.

The solution to this puzzle is rather odd. I know, what a surprise! I have to blow up the life-sized rubber armor I picked up from the Royal Bedchamber and present it to the knight. I guess the visor of the knight's helmet gravely impedes his vision because he mistakes the dummy for an actual foe and starts attacking it ineffectively. This is enough of a distraction that I can just walk past.

Shortly afterward I find myself in a dark cave. The text openly admits that the developers forgot to commission a picture for this scene, so they made their own. It literally says DARK CAVE...

If I continue walking to the south-west, I don't get eaten by a grue, but I fall to my death. Thankfully, I got a flashlight from the Adventure Helpline which I can turn on to safely traverse the cave.

Deeper inside the cave, I stumble upon the secret hiding place of a dragon who chained a woman to the wall. Curiously, Erik does not recognize her, which likely means that this is not Princess Gwendolyne. When she sees me, she immediately asks me to kill the evil dragon who is about to come back and eat her. At that moment, the dragon enters the room and just looks at me in surprise without doing anything.

If I talk to the green lizard, he tells me that the woman is a witch who's been holding him captive for years with her nefarious wizardry. Only just now did he manage to overpower her and put her in chains. If I kill anyone here, it should be her, before she can cast any spells.

The dragon is indeed telling the truth, and by killing the witch I gain his trust. He doesn't know anything about Gwendolyne, but he promises to help me search for the missing princess.

I don't know why, but at that point the parser decides that the dragon is not present anymore, even though he is still here, gnawing on the dead witch. I can't talk to him, neither can I look at him. However, when I enter REITE DRACHE (RIDE DRAGON), the parser is totally okay with it and lets me ride the previously non-existent dragon. What the hell.

The dragon drops me off on a plateau on top of a high mountain. There is no reason given why the dragon thinks this is the place where I would find the princess, but let's not expect this game's story to make sense all of a sudden.

Case in point, at the north side of the plateau I come across a door that just stands there without being attached to any kind of wall. Sadly, this is another picture where the central part of the room is not depicted. I can only assume that some parts of the game were changed pretty late during development, and at that time all the images had already been drawn.

Anyway, there is also a crown on the ground which I pick up. Now, if I try to unlock the door with any of the keys I have with me (I count six keys and a lockpick in my inventory), it opens up to reveal another door behind it. This happens seven times, and the last door just opens to thin air. I discovered a strange bug here that saved me a lot of typing: When I tried to just open a door without unlocking it, the game told me that maybe it was already open. Well, it wasn't. But when I tried to close the door (SCHLIESSE TUER), it got automatically unlocked with one of my keys and opened. Thus I just had to enter SCHLIESSE TUER seven times to open all of them, without having to type BENUTZE JOKERKEY, BENUTZE LOSERKEY, and so on.

With all the doors open, I take a leap of faith and walk through the empty frame. If I didn't have the parachute in my inventory, I'd fall to my death here.

With the parachute in my bag, I get transported into a room where the game's developers are waiting for me. Yeah, makes total sense to me.

The texter briefly introduces himself and his workmate and then shoves me back out of the door. The only thing I get from this bizarre encounter is a long piece of paper that is actually a program listing. As I said, the fourth wall left the game ages ago, probably in a huff.

The princess does not seem to be here. But hey, I found a sweet crown, and I remember somebody telling me how his fancy headgear got stolen by a stork. Thus I travel back to the castle, which involves a lot of walking from room to room. I have to endure 22 room transitions which, by today's standards, is half an eternity spent waiting for pictures to load. Good thing the emulator has a warp function.

Back in the Royal Garden, the frog aggressively snatches the crown out of my hands and dives into the pond. A moment later, he comes back out and drops a golden needle at my feet. Confused, I pick it up and watch the frog disappear into the pond, never to be seen again.

Would you believe that I now have all the items required to finish the game?

There is this purple door in the Music Room that can't be opened because it is locked from the other side. The last puzzle of the game is something that's been done before in a lot of other adventure games (probably beginning with Zork II). A classic, if you will.

I have to slide the listing under the door and push the key with the needle until it falls out of the hole and drops onto the piece of paper. Then I can pull back the listing, retrieve the key, and use it to unlock the door.

If I try to push the key out without having the listing under the door to catch it, I get killed by a randomly appearing bear right when I realize my mistake. That is certainly one way to prevent a Dead Man Walking situation (i.e. a situation where I can continue playing the game, even though I have no way of successfully finishing it).

Is it just me, or does her tiara look very much like a poker visor?

Guess what, Princess Gwendolyne never went to Derogwania's Dragon Region. The entire time she has been hiding in her room because of her fear that she would have to marry an ugly gnome. Although we never get to see Dirk, the game's protagonist, I guess he looks nice enough to make marriage a viable option. Do they love each other? Pfft, who needs affection anyway.

The game congratulates me, the player, for finishing the adventure and then explains in detail what happens to the two (they get children, Dirk goes to work in the gummy bear factory, Gwendolyne looks after the kids, they eventually drift apart, Dirk leaves). The game then changes its mind about the ending and instead describes how Dirk and Gwendolyne agree to skip the whole marriage shenanigans and decide to just live together happily ever after. The End.



CONCLUSION

You probably noticed that this is a rather odd game, to say the least. Each and every room description is filled with jokes, and the style of humor fluctuates wildly between locations. Sometimes it goes into directions it rather shouldn't, and it makes the whole game feel a bit incoherent. It was clearly intended as a parody, but at one point it forgot what it was supposed to be a parody of. That said, I genuinely had to laugh when I read certain descriptions, and I don't mind if a game decides not to take itself seriously at all.

I like the idea that the apparent main quest, to kill the giant, is ridiculously easy to do, but then you spend the rest of the game finding a way to cut off the giant's head and searching for the runaway princess.

The puzzles are not The Yawn's strong point. They are either quite easy to figure out or require an unhealthy amount of moon logic. I mean, one major puzzle requires you to gather seven keys from random people which you then use to open a magic door that leads to the game's developers who give you a program listing. There is no rhyme or reason to this, it's just random ideas that were thrown into the game, probably for no better reason than to make it extra goofy.

Some of these puzzles also require the player to walk back and forth between locations that are dozens of rooms apart. Since every room picture gets loaded separately, even if the previous room had the same image, this quickly becomes cumbersome. It's even worse if you play without a walkthrough and thus don't immediately know where to go. The game is quite expansive, and important locations are needlessly spread out with a lot of filler rooms in between.
At least the parser allows the player to enter several commands on one line (by separating them with periods), which makes moving around less of a slog.

Since I always feel obligated to make a map when I play an adventure game for this blog, I also created one for The Yawn. Click on the picture to see it in full resolution.

The graphics are certainly a highlight of the game. There is a lot to see, and all the images are nicely pixeled. Apart from the Magnetic Scrolls games, there aren't a lot of C64 adventures around that feature as many bitmap graphics of a similarly high standard. The fancy font was lifted from Ocean's 1985 text/graphics adventure game The Neverending Story and slightly altered to allow for German special characters.

The music is also worth a listen. As I mentioned already, there is only one track playing during the game, but it is long enough and varied that it doesn't become unbearable on repeated listen.

The Yawn is hard for me to judge because I never got to play it when I bought it back in 1990. At the age of twelve, I probably would've had a much higher opinion of the game and its sometimes asinine jokes. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of parts that made me laugh, and even if the humor occasionally completely derails, I don't get the impression there was any malicious intent behind it. The Byteriders went on to make several additional adventure games for the C64, and I am happy to say that among them is one of my absolute favorites. More on that when I get to Golden Disk 64 03/92.