Reviews by Canalboy

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The Only Possible Prom Dress, by Jim Aikin
An Enjoyable Soak In An Old School Tub, March 28, 2024
by Canalboy (London, UK.)
Related reviews: Large, Surreal, Parser based, TADS

The Only Possible Prom Dress was for my part a long-awaited sequel to Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina and showcases the author's admirable refusal to run with the modern interactive fiction herd. If you thought that long, puzzle-heavy parser games with subordinated plots were a thing of the past think again. While there's Jim Aikin there's hope for us old-timers.

I'd played Ballerina a decade ago and even then games of this type had of course become rarae aves. By the time of this sequel they had become as rare as right wing governments and pubs that take cash.

The diaphanous plot revolves around your efforts to buy your daughter Sam a dress for the senior prom as her kid brother has (deliberately or not) spilled ink on the designated apparel. A perfect excuse for another visit to the somewhat creepy and almost deserted Stufftown, Jim's ode to the excesses of consumerism. George Orwell once described advertising as "the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket" and the author obviously shares these sentiments; I was reminded of Cronenberg's Starliner Towers as I wandered around this futuristic dystopia. The whole scruffy, pigeon-violated edifice of Stufftown is crammed full of shops, twenty-nine of them to be precise, selling everything from surreal-shaped birdbaths to microscopes; they are nearly all deserted as a local lacrosse game has made the people of Stufftown forget about commercialism for a day at least. Rubbish is strewn in passageways, stairways are broken, maintenance equipment is rusty and forlorn. The NPCs you meet along the way and with whom you will have to interact to win are as decrepit as the building in which they work - Betsy the chain smoking girl from the beauty salon has fingernails bitten to the quick and has obviously just been dumped by her boyfriend; the corpulent clairvoyant spends her days knitting; the art gallery owner is chock full of existential angst and stares fixedly at the floor. The two owners of this corporate monstrosity sit in their glass-desked ivory tower on the top floor and dream of the future and virtual tours of their world where money is spent on cutting edge technology and not on disinfectant or hammer and nails.

Woven into this depressingly naturalistic milieu are a number of supernatural elements. These are used sparingly and thus with deftness. A homeless man sees pixies flying around his head; an annoying purple dinosaur follows you around and two experimental protagonists must be brought back to life to complete your mission by dint of recipe collecting. As you progress the difficulty level of the problems facing you increases and the story naturally progresses as problems are solved. It is not, however the kind of game where you are stuck on one problem and thus unable to progress; often solving one will help with a problem that you have put on the back burner.

You can choose to play the game with hints on or off and I chose the latter. The former feeds you clues on your mobile phone when you reach certain points in the narrative and FULL SCORE will show your progress out of two hundred and fifty and itemise the obstacles you have overcome, much like Curses.

The problems themselves constitute a mixture of traditional tropes. There are doors and portable items to be unlocked, anagrams and mathematical posers, hidden passages to be revealed, machines to be brought to working order or vandalised, stores to be broken into and other characters to be cajoled/bribed/unmasked. Favours are very much bought with favours.

There are seventy-four portable items and all have at least one use. There are no tiresome inventory limits or daemons and the game will automatically jettison items that you no longer need if you pass a certain central location in the game which is a thoughtful and none to easy to program feature. Some items have multiple uses. There are mazes in the game, however are all outside the drop items to map variety, a nod towards IF modernism.

It is pretty difficult to put the game into an unwinnable position although two particular puzzles do present this opportunity. Save, save and save again. I found the parser to be more than adequate and it will try to auto correct and interpret your typing errors. I came across almost no typos and very few other bugs, although one involving a locked gate stands out. This is not game breaking however.

In summary this is a well coded, well written puzzle-based diversion; if you are endowed with patience and like old style games with modern IF conveniences you will enjoy this. Just prepare to put aside a lot of spare time and read location descriptions very carefully.












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Quest for the Sangraal, by Jonathan Partington

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A Slightly More Lenient Mainframe Muse from Dr. Partington, March 3, 2024
by Canalboy (London, UK.)
Related reviews: Grail Quest., Phoenix, Treasure Hunt, Mainframe, Large

On my latest Quixotic journey through the Phoenix Mainframe canon I have just completed this game and retired to Castle Moan with six other Knights Errant, porting the Sangraal in my gauntleted fist.

This 1987 game is the third of a loose trilogy with Fyleet and Crobe by the same talented author. You leave (or rather are expelled) across the drawbridge of Castle Moan beside a cheering crowd as they wave you on to certain death. Lovely eh? Something akin to Les Tricoteuses who sat in the front row for the best views of a beheading by Madame la Guillotine. And not even a lamp or sword to brandish.

Sangraal was rumoured to be slightly less dendrite exploding than other games from this super hard stable and so it proved to be; it took me about 40 playing hours as opposed to the hundreds I laboured through on Hezarin, BrandX , Acheton etc. However, easy it is not and there is still ample scope to screw up. As ever with these games, make sure you have a solid chronological set of saved games to dip into, all leading up to a maximum of 600 points.

Across its 167 locations Sangraal is jam packed with the usual pen and paper puzzles and there seem to be more of these in this game than others from Dr. Partington's mind; it is also unusual in that much of the game is open from the start. You can probably traverse around two thirds of the map without solving anything which is handy for mapping purposes.

There are a number of set piece puzzles here which tend to seal off the whole area you were just in when you leave. These include an oriental palace dedicated to the seasons and months of the year; a maze which rotates every move so mapping it is tough; a set of boolean logic gates (yes I know!) an area of Limbo loosely based on Don Juan which also features Alexander The Great and some ancient grease (groan); and my favourite which is a magnificently constructed area where you have to commit the Seven Deadly Sins in a certain order. This is a masterpiece of imaginative logic. And you get to rob a beggar and enjoy some time in a harem! There is also a thinly veiled criticism of Orthodox Jewry defining one puzzle.

The game is studded with references to other literary works too including Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci; the legend of Parsifal, Orpheus and Eurydice; and the Wooden Horse amongst others. There is also an absorbing set piece in a folly where you pit your wits against an evil wizard and have to solve a series of logic puzzles, word and number games. Thankfully you can save after each puzzle which surprised me. This is one piece of evidence backing up the slightly easier reputation of the game; Hezarin and Acheton would never have let you do that.

As a side task from the Sangraal hunt you have to collect a number of animals for Noah and amass fourteen treasures and deliver them to an appropriate location. Be careful though as some treasures double up as puzzle solving objects too so don't deposit them too early as there is no way to claim them back. Frying tonight!

The game has the usual T/SAL coding for these games; an excellent two word parser but without the examine command, a seven item inventory limit and unusually no lamp or keys. That is pretty unusual for games of this age and genre. The descriptions are of medium length and very well done. I only came across one typo in my picaresque journey.

There are a couple of puzzle solutions which aren't that obvious; namely disposing of the hitherto mentioned La Belle Dame and catching the lamb. And shouting out mint sauce isn't the answer. Most of the solutions though are logical.

There are the usual sprinkling of hilarious puns including the Gordian newspaper, the hitherto mentioned ancient grease and a pile of salt which looks a bit like a running woman (but not a lot).

Having amassed the requisite treasures, deposited them and sent Noah off happily on his way across the flood plains you have short endgame to enable you to procure the Sangraal. You will need several peoples' help to achieve this and fittingly the game ends on a number manipulation puzzle.

This game would make the perfect introduction to the uniquely intellectual Phoenix world. Just don't expect Fyleet to treat you as nicely as this game sometimes does.

Oh dear it may be time for Quondam next....pith helmets and chest plates on lads.

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Quondam, by Rod Underwood and Peter Killworth

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
The Toughest Game Of All?, February 27, 2024

Robb Sherwin once observed quite sagely about Zork that the game actively hates its player. That may well be so; in which case Quondam wishes to eviscerate the player, gouge his / her eyes out and wrap one's entrails around one's neck while forcing said player to watch the Father Dowling Mysteries box set plus extras. What we have here is unequivocally the hardest text adventure that I have ever played in my forty years of puzzling. Compared to most of the Phoenix oeuvre it is compact in size but almost every location provides ample scope to die or misuse an item in one's inventory.

This was the third of the seventeen games written on the Phoenix mainframe in 1980 by the author Rod Underwood. It appears to have been his only foray into the world of text adventure creation but he indelibly left his mark with this one. The original mainframe version is sadly lost (like Andrew Lipson's Xerb and Alex Shipp and Steve Tinney's Hezarin) and it only survives thanks to a Peter Killworth port to the BBC. We have no way of knowing how much the original version differed from the BBC Acornsoft version but you can be sure it was ball-breakingly hard as well.

I played this game after finally nailing Acheton, Hezarin and Castle of Riddles from the same Cambridge stable and was fairly convinced that no game could be tougher than that holy trinity of mind exploders. I was wrong.

The game itself is the traditional treasure hunt (up to a maximum of 250 points) with an interesting time travel theme, hence the title which is Latin for former. You need to collect all of the treasures available and deposit them somewhere, but finding out where is like attempting to untie the Gordian Knot. Suffice to say that some puzzles should be attended to in the present day and some in the past. And at least one in the past and also in the present. Exactly. This game has more obscure verbs and off the wall object manipulation than any I have come across in forty years of text adventures. I have currently visited 72 locations and have discovered 28 ways to die, many of which almost lapse into parody. There are also many ways to lock yourself out of winning, both obvious or not. Indeed it is possible to make the game unwinnable in your first move!

All the tropes of early games are here, including massive turn critical mazes and outrageous puns. It's just that in this game, like the giant spiders on the web maze, they come at you in swarms filling just about every location. As if these obstacles didn't make your task difficult enough, the game uses some objects in totally unexpected ways. I found myself desperately trying all kinds of obscure commands to boldly go where no parser has gone before and some of them actually worked. Having played around five hundred text adventures in my time I have successfully used three verbs in this game that I have never used before and I guarantee that you have never utilised a mirror or a harp in the ways necessary in this game. When stuck try anything and it may just work. The knight, the fanged customs official, the Spanish Inquisition (I wasn't expecting that) a man-eating vegetable being and the dragon are all puzzles that require endless experimentation to overcome and the solutions to each are unique in the text adventure canon as far as I know. There are a couple of apparently illogical answers to puzzles as well; one in the apothecary's shop makes no sense to me even though I solved it; I'd tried everything else and found the answer by default. Another oddity is that some objects are deliberately described in a misleading way. One in particular has two different descriptions depending from which direction you came when you found it for the first time. Approach it from the wrong way (which isn't clear) and you have soft locked the game without realising it. Unfair? You bet.

Aside from the incredible toughness of the game and the necessity to perform actions in an exact order you can even die typing save or attempting to use an object. The desert affords you all of two moves before you die of thirst, in fact when you drink water the game responds with "your thirst is removed" then avers "you are thirsty" in the same move. Boy that is one dry desert. There is also an unmappable area of trackless forest in which you must thrash about until finally emerging into familiar territory.

Playing via the BeebEm emulator at least allows you to save without it costing you a move as it did in the original. As I have spent a lot of time racing around a spider's web with the residents only one move behind me this at least has made things slightly easier than it was for those masochistic souls playing on their BBC micros back in the day.

It has the standard T/SAL two word parser and no examine command plus an inventory limit of eight objects. I have come across two items that have multiple uses thus far so discard nothing that you find. Some treasures double up as tools for solving puzzles and all are suffixed by an exclamation mark in the manner of the day. There is an inventory limit of eight objects so you will need to work out how to manipulate the in-game system for leaving items and picking them up later at a different location. Some areas of the game are closed off after your initial visit so you'll need to carefully consider which items you haul around with you in any given area. I have so far discovered 36 takeable items.

This game is described with classic understatement as being for advanced players. That is rather like describing World War 2 as a spot of fistycuffs.

An update: I have now finally completed the game and can quite honestly say that this is the most difficult text adventure game that I have ever played. I make it 35 ways to die in 79 locations. It has the most obscure verbs, the most tortuous inventory manipulation and the most soft and hard locks as well.

All this aside I would recommend it for die hard purists like myself as it has enough clever puzzles to satisfy the most avid dissectologist.

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Avon, by Jon Thackray and Jonathan Partington

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Avon - If Shakespeare Had Been A Stand Up, February 10, 2024
by Canalboy (London, UK.)
Related reviews: Comedy, Treasure Hunt, Shakespearean, Topologika

Avon, the 1982 game from the Phoenix stable which released fifteen very challenging pieces of old school adventuredom between 1978 and 1989, is often considered to be one of the less difficult from that group of talented mathematical boffins. Having just completed it after many a long hour of brain torture, I would have to disagree with those who consider it so. In fact, the game has "strict statutes and most biting laws" if I may borrow some Shakespearean verse to mine own ends.

The first problem you will literally stumble across is how to find some light and the solution to this is pretty unfair I think. To those of you who remember the horrible puzzle in the shop at the start of Philosopher's Quest it should come as no surprise. Choosing the wrong object from four will immediately leave you in the dark and you will have to start again.

The game itself is written by the most prolific of the Phoenix adventure authors, Dr. Jonathan Partington and his love for all things Shakespearean really shines forth. Sir John Falstaff, the Lady Portia, Banquo's Ghost and a whole host of others tumble across the screen in a marvellously evocative caravanserai of characters. There are a lot of stabbings, poisonings, kisses and drownings so if you already get a lot of this at home you may find Avon a bit overkill. In my chastened, secluded monastery it was pulsating stuff indeed however.

Avon is studded with quotations and situations from Shakespeare's plays and here is where I need to take issue with previous reviewers of the game; it is claimed that no prior knowledge of the Bard's work is needed to complete it. In fact there are two scenarios where the solution depends on knowing famous quotes from his works. So prior knowledge is needed, and not just of the Swan of Avon but also that of a certain musical composer.

In common with many games in the Phoenix stable it is very easy to put the game into an unwinnable state and to lose or miss a vital object. As the game plays out over three days using the same set of locations (that is Twelfth Night, The Ides Of March and Midsummer's Day) I sometimes found it difficult to work out which puzzles could be solved on the date I was currently in and which needed solving at a later date. There is also one recurring problem which must be visited on all three dates. The puzzles themselves are, as usual from Dr. Partington, extremely clever and humorous, and more than one relies on committing an outrageous pun. The solution to escaping the gaol and one inside the Boar's Head Inn would be amongst the funniest I have ever come across. Think Tommy Cooper with a chainsaw.

Be careful where you Save (avoid saving the game just after you have received one of the many secret words you will learn during the game as it can render the whole experience unwinnable). Save after applying the word or phrase in the appropriate place. Some items have more than one use as well so avoid discarding them after their first application. The inventory limit is seven items which is standard practice with the T/SAL coding used for these games; it is not too difficult however to store your ammassed collection somewhere central.

The triptych of the game (if so it may be called) is unevenly proportioned. The third section is probably the longest, followed by the first and then the second. There are several pseudo mazes and the solutions to them all are very imaginative as none rely on the tried and trusted "drop one item per location" rule. The game weighs in at just under ninety locations which is somewhat smaller than most Phoenix offerings, however the three days' setting made it seem bigger to me than it actually is.

The marvellously evocative descriptions and responses are neither prolix nor too short. The two word parser eschews EXAMINE and OOPS but does cater for TAKE ALL and VERBOSE and it was never a problem for me expressing what I wanted to do or say. The whole was a perfect exercise in mimetic immersion for me and I really felt I was in Shakespearean England when I played this.

Nearly all of the puzzle solutions are very clever / very funny with two notable exceptions. As portended by the first puzzle mentioned above it is easy to make the whole thing unwinnable. There are several mazes but all are solvable without dropping your hard won inventory. No lamp/thirst/hunger daemons. If you like puzzles and puns and don't mind learning through death and taking notes on a piece of paper you'll love Avon. If you love Twine and hypertext, 'twere well it were not done at all.

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Castle Ralf, by Doug Clutter and Steve Vance

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Castle Ralf - Oldie But Goldie DOS Challenge, January 19, 2024
by Canalboy (London, UK.)
Related reviews: MS-DOS, old school, large, puzzle fest, castle

I don't know if all IF players of a certain age who witnessed the evolution and flowering of the inchoate genre from the late seventies / early eighties have a game (or games) which they return to for reasons of nostalgia or masochism, but mine is this one.

Having first cut my adventuring teeth on Scott Adams' Adventureland in 1983 on a friend's Vic-20, I played many of the early games both good and bad in the late eighties; this included Castle Ralf.

Like many authors of the time, Doug Clutter and Steve Vance had completed Zork I and wanted to try and outrun the boys from Infocom by forming their own company, Douglas Associates. While this was a predictably futile task, they undoubtedly did come up with a very well coded and interesting puzzle fest with precious few bugs present. Aside from the odd typo there are no glaring ones that I have ever come across in many hours of playing.

The "explore/escape from a wacky building full of contraptions" genre was of course already somewhat anachronistic by 1987 when this game was first published but it remains one of the best examples of its kind.

The robust parser rather oddly doesn't understand "take all" but does understand "drop all." On the whole however it is more than adequate and unlike many games of its type recognises most synomyms and objects in the many rooms of the eponymous castle. It also (rather atypically for its time) has a list of verbs on screen that you can access via highlighting and pressing the enter key so there is no hunting around for obscure verb / noun combinations. You can also use the COGITATE verb at many places to give you an abstract hint and boy will you need it as this game surpasses all but the Topologika games in terms of toughness but fairness in my opinion. The authors seemed to realise this and produced a hint booklet a la Topologika which is available online on this page. It runs to many many questions and answers and is designed to discourage straight through reading.

The game also features an auto mapper which can be switched on and off if you prefer not to use modern software like Trizbort and you will need it as the castle spans a basement and three floors over many more than a hundred locations. Initially the routes around the more far flung reaches of the building are time consuming to access, but as with games like Mulldoon Legacy and Curses short cuts appear to the various areas of the castle as puzzles are solved.

There are a number of complex machines scattered around the place, designed by the devious owner Dr. Bellefleur Q. Izgotcha III. One multi puzzle in particular involving a customised Skeet Shooter and a French Horn cum Crossbow spans multiple rooms filled with Heath Robinson like contraptions and more than rivals the Babel Fish puzzle from HHG in its complexity.

Many of the imaginative puzzles are more convoluted than "Do X with Y to get Z" but logically solvable with a bit (or a lot) of lateral thinking.

A dryly sparkling humour pervades the whole thing which stays just the right side of irritating. Try and COGITATE in the Long Dark Hallway for example! And apparently the Great Hall was designed by Nancy Reagan.

The game is mercifully free of mazes, hunger, thirst and light daemons and although it is possible to make the thing unwinnable in several different places this only becomes apparent much later on in many instances with two major exceptions - the machines in the Trap Door Room and in the adjoining room on the west balcony behind the french doors. You will usually be informed here if you have irreparably misused a device. Just save often. There is an inventory limit but it rarely becomes much of a problem as a chosen central silo to store all objects in is accessible from most parts of the game as it opens up.

The game runs very smoothly in my version of DosBox (0.74) and the colours are customisable.

I have to admit at this point that I have still not beaten the game after returning to it several times in the last thirty odd years, although I have recently pushed my score up to 190 points out of a possible maximum of 300. There is no walkthrough available anywhere online (something I never resort to anyway).

There are few NPCs in the game aside from an exhibitionistic Hamster, an avariciously psychotic Chihuahua and a useful ghost that I have ever come across.

There is also a strange obsession with hats which will gradually unravel as you play.

Castle Ralf was originally a competition game where the person to solve it in the least number of moves by a given date would pocket 10% of the royalties. I have no idea if this was ever claimed.

Now where is the combination to that safe...

Stop press - after twenty odd years I have finally finished this! The secret is...never presume you have done something when you haven't. And to add to the general mood of head scratching there are several red herrings. Map uploaded to CASA.

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Spheres of Chaos, by Chris Grant

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A Large Puzzle Fest Across A Sprawling Rural Landscape, January 3, 2024
by Canalboy (London, UK.)
Related reviews: Large, Odyssey, RISC OS, Puzzle Fest, Parser, NPCs

Spheres of Chaos is a rara avis indeed - that is a large text only RISC OS adventure consisting of over 250 locations written by Chris Grant in 1994 (his only adventure as far as I can see) and I played it via the RPCEmu Emulator.

It is a linear odyssey with the goal to collect seven spheres of chaos scattered throughout an impoverished rural kingdom in an indefinite (seventeenth century?) bygone age and then to harness their power to prevent an evil king using them to his nefarious ends.

The white text on black background display is easy on the eye and the excellent location descriptions show that the author has a real eye for creating a believable milieu. The game also features sixteen NPCS which is more than most adventures of its kind; these range from friendly ones (the Giant and the Hermit) to those of a less philanthropic bent (the somewhat incongruous Lager Lout who vacillates between trying to kill you and calling you his best mate). Most of them can be addressed and often they proffer up useful information or objects; some need bribing. Generally "say x to y" covers all conversational bases although I struggled with the jungle king and his guard. Some of the NPCs appear to possess an adventurous spirit as they wander quite widely across the game's canvas; I once stumbled across the farmer tidying up in the network of caves - I have a strong suspicion his ambit should not exceed the farmhouse. Another NPC (the shambling mummy) seems to be directly lifted from the mainframe giant Acheton although I doubt if it has had the pleasure of meeting Mike Oakley.

The landscape itself is split up into several regions, namely a windmill surrounded by corn fields, a large forest, a lake with a water mill and central island, an interesting "city in the sky" constructed of bridges and tree houses high in the trees of a forest, an overgrown crater, a large castle replete with cesspit (don't try swimming!) and a village. Some of the regions cannot be revisited so it is important to work out which objects you need when leaving one particular region as the inventory limit is set at six and is predicated on number, not weight. There are three objects for which there appear to be no use and a few small mazes but they can be entered and exited fairly quickly via random movements with the exception of the small maze in the mine which can be mapped in the old fashioned way by dropping objects.

Given the size of the game the actual puzzles themselves are not great in number and I can't help but feel that the acquisition of the spheres could have been made more interesting and difficult as none require strong powers of reasoning to acquire, with the exception of the Sphere of Despair. Maybe my exposure to much tougher mainframe adventures recently has improved my forensic abilities but few people should be stumped by the puzzles contained herein.

There are a few bugs scattered throughout the game, i.e. you can carry all seven spheres if you drop all and take all but only six of them if you pick them up one by one. Another annoying feature is that the HELP command admonishes you for your stupidity and exits the game play session. There is also only scope for one saved position so I ended up moving saved game states and renaming them as back ups.

The parser is run of the mill and recognises EXAMINE and TAKE ALL. The game has no score or progress indicator but does exhibit an occasional dry wit, i.e. attempting to kill someone who is not present elicits, "There is no-one here to kill. What a shame."

Overall an interesting and none too easy diversion but most of the problems come from the sheer size of the game, working out which items to carry on to the next region and the phrasing of commands when addressing the NPCs. I recommend drawing a map as some regions are difficult to reconnoitre from memory. Interestingly there are no dark regions at all and no hunger or thirst timers. I can't think of a similar sized game with no light source whatsoever.

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The Hermit's Secret, by Dian Crayne

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A Large Treasure Hunt From A More Patient Age, January 2, 2024
by Canalboy (London, UK.)
Related reviews: Puzzle Fest, Large, Old Fashioned, Two Word Parser, Mazes

Hermit's Secret was the second of six games written by the science fiction author Dian Crayn (she had several pseudonyms) in 1982 and 1983. They are all of a piece, that is large, puzzle based treasure hunts replete with mazes (a couple of them nasty with random exits) and timed end sequences. As I have always been a fan of old style games these are right up my street, or down my grating if you prefer. The grating reference is apt as all of the games have more than a bottom note of Willie Crowther and Don Woods. Each has its equivalent of the pirate and the axe throwing dwarves and in this game they are an over-stressed salesman, a hooded assassin and an obsequious elf. Keep on the move and you should be okay. There is even an homage to the dragon killing method in the 1976 game in here as is the last lousy point. There are also a number of magic words in the game that transport you instantaneously across its broad canvas and into some secret rooms which are not reachable by conventional means.

Dian's descriptions are mostly well-done and of medium length although the two word parser could have been improved by allowing more location items to be interacted with - "examine" is not included. There is a coding oddity in that the table for the push command appears to be empty. This does not prevent the game from being completed but does affect a later game, Granny's Place from being wrapped up. I also make no apologies in spoiling one particular puzzle which had me flummoxed for ages, namely digging in the mud hole only works if you are holding the pig. It should be predicated upon whether or not you are holding the shovel but there is a dodgy conditional flag here; likewise when attempting to cross the chasm with the pig. I realised it must be possible to dig at the mud hole as the parser hints as much when you essay the action sans porker.

In all there are 22 of the Hermit's treasures to be located and stored in an unlikely place across over 200 locations; these are split roughly between two thirds below ground and one third the other side of the topsoil.

There is a lamp timer at work but the number of moves permitted is so large that this should not be a problem - if it is, a battery vending machine can be located guess where? Yup that's right, thank you Don Woods.

I played via DOSBox-X which is my go to program for playing these old DOS games. I find it gives a better save game experience and a cleaner more customisable display.

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The Phantom's Revenge, by Dian Crayne

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
An Excellent Dian Crayne Ghost Story Cum Puzzler In Dos, November 27, 2023
by Canalboy (London, UK.)
Related reviews: Treasure Hunt, Fantasy, Ghost Story, Parser, Vast

On the whole I enjoyed this game; I like Dian's games in general but this one ratchets up the story and the atmosphere as you progress while containing some very devious puzzles. It has a much better back story than Dian's Castle Elsinore for instance which was written just afterwards.

There is a steep augmentation in puzzle difficulty towards the end and you have to pay particular attention to character motivation and the back history of your (and others) erstwhile existence to logically solve the last section. There is a jaw dropping moment when you enter a certain location and find out who you are. Dian's skills as an author stand her in good stead here over the 170 odd locations in the game; it is not easy melding a treasure hunt with a Phantom Of The Opera style story but this is one of the better hybrids that I have played.

On the down side there are a few bugs including my bug bear of a non-described ordinal exit and a creature that can be slain but upon returning to the scene of the battle is dead yet still alive (no, not like Leonard Cohen). The knife wielding maniacs become tiresome after their third or fifth appearance as well. I also encountered a couple of parser struggles but in a game this size and with only a two word parser this is excusable and I found the right synonym after a few attempts in both instances. There are a number of magic words and transportation locations to save on lamp time which is generously dished out at 1000 moves. And in keeping with its reverential nods to Crowther and Woods there is a last lousy point which makes more sense than in the original. Just be on your toes or you'll miss the boat.

The inventory limit is predicated on weight not number of objects which is of course more realistic but the short cuts to the more far flung reaches of the game mean that it is never too onerous a task to pick up an object dropped earlier through overload. There is the game's equivalent of the thieving pirate but you have to let him steal from you at least once to glean all the treasures.

Add a couple of small but navigable mazes and this should keep you busy for a good few days.

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Acheton, by Jon Thackray, David Seal, and Jonathan Partington

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Mega Mainframe Madness From The Stupendous Seventies, November 11, 2023

Acheton has finally bitten the dust for me. A bit like getting married, cleaning the windows or cutting one's toenails, I had kept putting off a full scale assault on this 1978 mainframe game until the last possible moment. My previous dalliances with it had led me to believe that a full score of 1500 points and the discovery of all 55 treasures would in fact be a triumph of hope over experience.

And so I pulled out my etiolated, half completed maps penned in the days of Filofaxes and mobile phones the size of an engineering brick, squinted at them, shook my head and filed them under "Ignore."

Once more unto the breech....

Acheton was one of the first, if not the very first, game to be written in England, begun by two Cambridge postgraduates Jonathan Thackray and David Seal (who also wrote the proprietary T/SAL programming language that would become a standard for the Cambridge few) and doubled in size by Dr. Jonathan Partington after he had completed the first half. The whole thing took around two years to write. It took me about that number of man hours to solve it. The version I played was the Phoenix version converted to Z Code and it has some minor differences to the Topologika version released for micros. The advantage of the former lies mainly in the fact that a typo doesn't cost a turn, which in this game is often the difference between success and a sudden demise.

The game begins with a warning to would be players that it is considerably harder than the Adventure mainframe original upon which it is based and this isn't a frivolous piece of advice; deaths ranging from Cirrhosis of the Liver to being savaged by Ferrets almost certainly await you underground. Indeed a list of deaths and ways to make the game unwinnable would I suspect run to more text than the complete coding of some games.

All begins above ground at the end of a Good Road near a Farmhouse. Exploration throws up a few traditional items (and a handful of sudden deaths!) including two that ostensibly seem to lead to a route underground but don't. You have been warned.

When you finally make it down below, multiple routes soon lead to multiple routes. Most passages curl or bend sharply so mapping is somewhat tricky although Trizbort is a big help. In the days of yore I ended up with multiple ruined line drawings on A3 paper and empty biros.

My advice to any would be player is to not worry too much about tilting for victory early on. Explore, die, explore, die and slowly the map is pushed outwards and your score increases. Deserts lead to a Shoreline via an Egyptian Pyramid. Giant Caves lead to a Mine. A Wizard's Garden leads to a Roc's Nest. My advice is keep many saved copies, more so than in just about any other game. And remember that when this was written there was almost nothing else around so you couldn't become frustrated, give up and move on to one of the many thousands of other games that are now available. Put yourself in a Seventies mind set, convince yourself there are no other games to try and you will have those eureka! moments just when you thought you would give up. And the rewards are well worth fighting for.

In deference to the difficulty of many of the puzzles there is an excellent set of graduated hints which start at a basic nudge and usually finish in the total solution to a problem. These are not present in the Phoenix version. I can resist anything except temptation so I avoided the use of these.

The actual problems themselves range from "use A with B to get C" but usually in a very clever and subtle way, to chaining problems which run across multiple locations (very much a trait of Dr. Partington's games in general.) I can think of maybe only two puzzles I would call downright unfair. And some, like one inside the pyramid, are exquisitely constructed.

The thing that really made the game so tough for me though is the lamp timer. You will need to find a way to recharge it and even then it is tight to finish in time, as choreographing the jigsaw so that you can fit it all together in the life span of the lamp and not leave behind an object somewhere where you can't get it any more is just as challenging as the puzzles themselves. There is a built in transportation system which you will need to use in the game, for without it you will never get all your trinkets into the safe in time.

Unusually for these games there is an inventory limit of eight items; I think all the others have a limit of seven.

Magic words, short cuts to other regions and NPCs abound. The latter include a Mummy (an affectionate in-joke aimed at a certain Mike Oakley) a drunken Dwarf, an old Weaver, Pirates, Snakes, Scylla and Charybdis, a Garden Gnome, a Wizard... nearly all of them are out to put a spanner in your works.

I must confess that I got to 50 treasures and got completely stuck. Fortunately Adam Atkinson was on hand to give me some subtle hints and without him I really don't think I would have crawled over the finish line.

At the end of it all there is the inevitable (for its time) endgame which is something of an anti-climax. It is fairly straightforward and not particularly memorable.

In short, this game is everything that is unfashionable nowadays. That doesn't take away from its entertainment value if you have a decent attention span and come from an era before everyone had an allergy to something in the air or on their plate. Or to a lot of words on their Monitor.

The game has the standard (for its time) two word parser but it isa very good one. TAKE ALL works and TAKE and also DROP will assume the last object used. Unfortunately no VERBOSE or BACK or, of course, EXAMINE. This only really bothered me in one place, in the Wizard's Garden.

Given the latitude afforded by the mainframe space that the authors had available there are nicely evocative descriptions; long when they need to be with the occasional long text dump. There are almost no typos and no real bugs either that I came across in gameplay.

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Gateway to Karos, by Derek Haslam

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Derek Haslam's Excellent Expanded RISC OS Version Of An Old Acornsoft Game, November 10, 2023

I have just finished play testing Derek Haslam's new version of this game for RISC OS emulators. Thirty-nine years after the original Acornsoft version was released the author has extensively rewritten and expanded the game into a highly entertaining 296 room odyssey to claim the magical Talisman of Khoronz and return with it to Carraway Court (together with various assorted plunder you have accumulated along your quixotic way). Freeing himself from the memory shackles of the old 32K BBC the programmer has been able to produce a much more interesting and absorbing experience.
I have seldom played a text adventure which has the almost perfect melding of back story and puzzle fest. Derek is a natural writer and the world of the island of Karos (together with sundry small islands scattered around its coast) is woven skilfully around the story of the wizard Khoronz and his battle against the evil Vork.

The game encompasses many regions, from snowy mountain passes to treacherous swamps (watch what you are wearing) and thick forest. A castle sitting on a remote island, a deep and hazardous coal mine traversing a large underground region and stone barrows containing hidden clues are all to be explored and the game also features many NPCs, both friendly and informative ones who will impart essential information, sell you essential items (the barter system is de rigueur in some cases) and sometimes kill you. There are volcanic eruptions, sea monsters, wolves and kobolds to deal with, together with the most original use for an anvil that I have ever come across. It is possible to circumnavigate the island of Karos on a craft and there are several landing spots but be careful as it is very easy to drown on needle rocks or be sucked into a whirlpool amongst other entry points to Davy Jones's Locker. You will need a certain amount of nautical know-how to manoeuvre the boat correctly.

One unusual facet of the game is movement. In the main part of the island the normal eight compass directions plus up and down and occasionally in and out are used but indoors and occasionally at the more far flung regions left, right, forwards and backwards are used. This took me a while to perfect but it actually works very well once you get your head around the logistical concept.

The game does feature a very generous lamp timer, a continually descending number of energy points (you start with 1000 and lose one for each move or occasionally more at sea) but these can be replenished in several ways. There are no thirst or hunger timers. I particularly like the lamp icon which appears in the top left hand corner of the screen to remind you if it is on or off.

The inventory limit is set at a very high number and realistically heavier objects are more difficult to carry; indeed one can only be dragged. Almost every item has at least one use so discard nothing. Occasionally you will receive a helpful message stating that an item is no longer needed after you have used it for a particular task.

I finally finished after approximately fifteen upgraded versions and amassed over a thousand points although there was one treasure I did not collect along the way.

The fully released final version will include an incremented hint system at certain locations where continually typing "hint" or "help" will give you clues of gradually increasing helpfulness. This function is likely to get a fair amount of use as the puzzles in the game are sometimes far from easy but always fair. I don't think that it is possible to put the game into an unwinnable state without the player being aware of the fact.
I would definitely advise creating a map as the island is so large you will get lost on more than one occasion and the layout may even suggest a problem solution or two.

I thoroughly recommend giving this Tolkienesque work a go. Details of where to download the game are available on CASA. It can also be downloaded from Derek's web site http://www.boulsworth.co.uk/intfict/index.htm

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