Jinxter

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Jinxter is a text adventure computer game developed by Magnetic Scrolls and published by Rainbird in 1987.

Jinxter is set in the fictional country of Aquitania, which bears a strong resemblance to early-to-middle 20th century Britain. The central characters in the story are called "guardians" - immortal beings who look after and help other people. These "guardians" are described as liking to wear herringbone overcoats and eating cheese sandwiches.

A magical object, called the Turani bracelet, holds luck and distributes it throughout Aquitania. However, the bracelet was stolen by a witch called Jannedor Nasty, who stripped it of its five magical charms and hid them in various places. The player character is, pretty much accidentally, recruited by the guardians to retrieve the charms and fix the Turani bracelet, restoring luck to Aquitania.

Jinxter is famous for its quirky, eccentric humour. Many of the textual descriptions are very long and have a humorous aspect. Each of the five charms provides a magic spell, and the words to trigger these spells are common placeholder names.

Unlike many other text adventures, in Jinxter the player character never dies. Even if he gets into otherwise lethal situations, one of the guardians always appears in some absurd way, and saves his life.

Jinxter was released for the Atari ST, Atari 8-bit, Commodore Amiga, Acorn Archimedes and MS-DOS.