Reviews by ChrisM

Picture the scene: it is a Saturday afternoon in 1983. Thatcher has just won her second term in office, TV-AM has awoken a startled British public to the UK's first breakfast television service, and the Queen has bestowed a knighthood on Clive Sinclair for inventing the means by which Ant Attack and Manic Miner can be bought into being, at last. But you shun the empty calories of such vulgar arcade-stuff: you want something more wholesome and cerebral, something that will engage your critical faculties and lateral thinking skills. In short, you want to play a text adventure. Happily, you have such a thing to hand in the form of The Golden Apple, from Hull's illustrious 'Arctic Computing' software house. You pop the cassette in the tape recorder, adjust the volume to 7.5, and crack open a bottle of Panda Pops and a packet of Monster Munch while you wait for your afternoon's entertainment to load. You hope to have made good progress by tea time, maybe have it finished in time for Sunday dinner. You're not expecting it to be a walk in the park, but you're a clever young man and you've had previous form with these sorts of games. How difficult can this one be, authored as it is by a bookish A-level student with an interest in computer programming (perhaps one day you'll be just like him)? The tape has finished; you admire the colourful loading screen and then, with baited breath, press a key to begin...

I am on the road, near a mansion

Time passes...

You play for a while. Quite a long while. In fact, a very long while. 37 years later and the Panda Pops has run out, the Monster Munch has all gone. The Berlin Wall has fallen, electric cars are on the roads, your fridge-freezer has become quasi-sentient, and the Tories are back in power, again. You should probably have left home and had a family by now; you vaguely remember your parents moving out and leaving you to it. You've grown a Methuselean beard and you haven't looked away from the flickering TV screen in over three decades. And yet, you still haven't got all the treasures! How can the game be so difficult? The parser is a quite adequate two-word affair, the locations are concise, the map easily navigable, the objects more or less commonplace. And yet, somehow, from the mind of a 17-year-old youth has sprung a game so difficult, so utterly intractable, that it is formally impossible to complete without the aid of a walkthrough: mathematicians have proven that even an infinite number of monkeys pounding the rubber keyboards of an infinite number of ZX Spectrums could not do it. They would give up in frustration before even the final heat death of the universe had occurred. You type HELP, desperately, for the 10,000th time and still the same mocking message appears (how could it have changed?): a help sheet is available from (a residential address in Hull). Perhaps you should have bitten the bullet and sent off that self-addressed envelope after the first 6 months. Was three and a half decades leaving it too late? It must be worth a try. But maybe you'll do that tomorrow, after a final attempt. The answers must be here somewhere, you just need to look more carefully (although not much can be EXAMINEd, it is true). You've got the orb and the tin of paint, you've sung the glass case into fragments, the parrot is squawking Hamlet at you, and you've fed salmon to a crocodile. All you need is a little more time to figure it all out. Now, concentrate...

A solid escape room game with puzzles that are just about the right level of hardness if you want something to think about...but not too hard. I did it in about 45 mins with a full score and didn't need any hints along the way (but they are there if you need them). The story isn't hugely germane to the gameplay but nevertheless, it is there and the revealing of it in snippets and flashbacks as you progress through the game is quite effective. The writing is good and does what it needs to do in relaying tension and a feeling of impending peril, with a minimum of flashing lights and blaring sirens. Give it a go, get through to the end and be reassured that you will know exactly what to do the next time you find yourself in a fix in low Earth orbit.

A fairly typical Quilled text adventure from legendary ZX Spectrum publisher Zenobi. This one is set on the Greek island of Thira, putative location of the Atlantis of fable, where you have decided to go on holiday and accidentally stumble upon a fabulous underwater kingdom during a quick dip in the sea just down the road from your hotel room. It's a fun little run-around with some amusing writing in the usual droll style of 8-bit text adventures. Thira itself is a small but lively place, populated mainly by shifty mule-vendors and sandal-proffering youths who are just after your trousers, whereas Atlantis itself is so sedate that most of the inhabitants have fallen into suspended animation! But in spite of that, there is still some puzzly fun to be had if you're looking for a retro-flavoured diversion to fill an hour or two.

The parser is more or less what you would expect for a game from this era: mostly two-word, with a couple of occasions where a multi-word input is required. There are the standard 'guess the verb' frustrations in a few places (although the right words are not that difficult to work out, for those players gifted with more than minimal patience), and a couple of unexpected sudden death scenarios (I was arrested for (Spoiler - click to show)indecent exposure in one instance, and (Spoiler - click to show)burnt my feet on a hot beach in another. Part of the normal daily routine for the average British holiday-maker, but seemingly enough to make you give up your quest for Atlantis in this game). Naturally, this being a classic text adventure, you have to spend a lot of time examining objects and locations, most of which yield nothing much but occasionally prove essential to completing the game. If you’re feeling really lazy then you might need to glance at a walk-through, but there is nothing too perplexing involved here and there is even the (very occasional) built-in HELP prompt to assist with the more obscure puzzles. The ending feels a bit as though the author is running out of ideas, with the Atlantan royal family snoozing in rooms next to one another (yet desperate to be reunited) and separated by a slightly odd locked door puzzle. But that doesn't really matter as the player has probably had enough by that point and the end is in sight! And duly arrives, after a rather pointless-seeming return to your starting point.

Judged by the standards of the time and taken on its own terms, this isn’t a bad little game at all and should certainly provide a brief and mildly fantastic diversion for players interested in such retro stuff.

This is an amusing little game with some strong writing and a well-drawn player character in Ariadne, a sassy novitiate priestess who gets caught up in a little light espionage after a night in the sack with a couple of local goatherds. The map is fairly small and the story very linear: you are more or less trundled along from one scene to another with quite a lot of heavy hints and signposting to help you along the way. That being so, the puzzle coefficient is pretty small, but the whole feels immersive and convincing enough (thanks to the writing) for that not to matter too much. If you're in the mood for something not too taxing then this makes a pleasant diversion for an hour or so.

There are a few typos in there, and some other minor issues (for example, at one point you're told that you converse with a character while you walk to another location, but you don't actually leave the location that you are in), but nothing too egregious to distract from the overall experience.