Spellbound

Spellbound is an adventure-platformer created by David Jones for Mastertronic. It was published under the label Mastertronic Added Dimension in 1985 for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. The Commodore 64 and Atari-8 bit versions were released in 1986.

Unlike the first game of the Magic Knight series, Finders Keepers, Spellbound can be fully considered a graphic adventure. It's not point-and-click, and you explore the world from a side view typical of platformers, but you will find objects, environment elements, and characters, and you can interact with them using a list of actions such as Examine, Read, Give, and Take. All of this is implemented with an engine called Windimation, developed by David Jones, that is very similar to the contextual menus or modern operative systems. It really reminds me of the menu and windows you could see on MS-DOS at the end of the '80s.

Following the success of Spellbound, two more Magic Knight games were released by Mastertronic: Knight Tyme and Stormbringer.