This game, published in late 1985 by an obscure company called Strategic Games Publications (227 Sinclair Ave, in Staten Island) for C64, seems to have been recovered, as I have been able to find a recent cracked release. It is a classic treasure hunt on a fantasy setting, and not very interesting. Seems to have been developed with AdventureWriter, which was the C64 version of Gilsoft’s The Quill (this is my surmise based on appearances; I have not checked this with the available binary).
The game is totally unlisted anywhere, even in the current C64 Gamebase (v19 at the time of this post). I have added an IFDB entry for it. I’m not posting any links to the game proper here, because it is technically abandonware and its legal status is questionable, but the release can easily be found if you search by literal name.
For the retrohistorians out there, there is a brief acknowledgement of receipt in the Take a Peek section of Computer Gaming World#25 (Jan-Feb 1986), page 15.
The physical disk has been in Mocagh’s collection for years, but it was hard to tell if it was a traditional text adventure, or more of an RPG, without having a nose at the files.
Like you say, as mentioned on the title screen, this one is a Quilled game, using the US variant.
Kenneth Buchs is a known author; if he’s the same person that wrote The Crystal Orb for C64. That one isn’t on CASA because it does seem to be more of an RPG.
Skarn seems to have some puzzles in, from nosing at the database, but looks like it is quite combat heavy.
Somehow it had escaped cataloguing in retro DBs for quite a while, maybe due to it being rare and not widely circulated.
Genre questions can get hairy. This one feels more IF than RPG to me, but I’m no purist. I regard hybrids such as Zyll as IF due to the puzzle and narrative aspects, although they have plenty of RPG elements. The fact that Skarn’s Keep is also a parser game tips the balance, but I agree that The Crystal Orb is a text-based RPG instead. Plenty of examples can be given where the boundaries are contentious. Rather not go there.
Yes, I wouldn’t argue against this ones inclusion in CASA; were I adding new games!
I’ve not played it, but the code seems to suggest a lot of actions happen automatically by bringing objects to the same location (such as the two halves of a gem stone) rather than having to type in specific commands. Which is an interesting approach.