Reviews by Canalboy

Whembly Castle was shoved in my direction by Jason Dyer via his laudable and fascinating blog in which he intends to tackle every text adventure ever written. He is currently flailing along in the rapids of 1982 and can probably hear the tumultuous roar of 1984 some way up ahead where the currents are really deep and strong.

This particularly large area of whitewater is only playable via a North Star Horizon emulator which itself can be made to run from within DOSBox-X by mounting the relevant directory (in my case D:\Horizon) then typing HORIZON to run the emulator. You then need to select F7, choose RO and then select the .nsi file you should have saved in the Horizon directory {Whembly Castle.nsi}. You should after a few seconds receive the North Star DOS 5.0 prompt. At this stage type GO BASIC and when the prompt READY appears type LOAD CASTLE and the instructions will ask you if you wish to carry on a saved game or start a new one. It is worth speeding up the cycles in DOSBox-X though as it runs very slowly initially; one of the downsides of running an emulator within an emulator.

Once up and running you can explore the region around a lake and a nasty maze which will need dedicated mapping skills because any one direction missed could be the one that houses an item vital for your continuity. At least there is a handy collection of objects near the start which are ideally suited for the purpose of maze mapping.

Once this item has been gleaned you can make progress breaking into a cabin and a shack where oars and fuel are your ticket out of here and onto the mysterious lake and its castle set in the centre.

The castle in itself is a massive one with hundreds of rooms, secret corridors, paintings of Alice In Wonderland and Sir John Whembly there for you to admire and decipher as clues to where the missing sack of gold could be secreted away. Word puzzles, generators and wells all need to be maintained and brought back to life before any obvious deductions can be made. The maze below the well is a whopper consisting of over sixty locations that have to be thoroughly mapped as several items and tools are scattered about and each will be necessary to solve the treasure hunt. My map currently registers nearly 300 locations and I suspect I am nowhere near solving the thing. One nice touch is no inventory limit which makes dropping objects to map the mazes easier to do. And there are privies. Lots and lots of 'em. Maybe the author had a weak bladder but I am reminded of the Not The Nine O' Clock news sketch with Rowan Atkinson choosing a bathroom suite. Look it up on YouTube.

The game is unfortunately somewhat buggy and on my first play through I was unable to enter the boat. When I restarted however I could reach the area with the boat much more quickly and consequently I could enter the boat and make sail into the large lake. I suspect my manifold save game slots on the first assault had somehow corrupted the game file. The game also shows its age in only accepting upper case commands which is a bit of a pain as I fill in my trizbort map in normal upper and lower case so I am constantly having to toggle the caps lock when typing.

For the purist and completist text adventure fan this is a must play. Younger players probably won't like it but such is life.

Mordon's Quest from Australian developers Melbourne House was co-written by John Jones-Steele of Level 9 authorship fame in 1985. I won't remind the Antipodeans that England won the Ashes back that year. Oh dear I just did.

Written in Assembler and released for a wide range of micros back in the filofax era this text only game will seem cruel and gigantic to modern tastes (it is possible to render the game unwinnable but these instances should be axiomatic at the time). It does however stand up as one of the best examples of its era. Spanning 161 well-written and evocative locations the two-pronged objectives are to assemble the seven parts of an Eternity Machine (bravery/heroism) and to amass twelve treasures (greed/acquisitiveness). It pays to read the descriptions very carefully as not all exits are mentioned outright. Make sure your map is carefully drawn too as it will be needed to solve one particular puzzle early in the game and there are several puzzles that are turn critical; some nice chaining conundrums also span several locations.

The display is nicely presented on the Fuse emulator at least, given some of the horrible fonts that were game defaults on the Spectrum for one. Responses are very fast due to the nature of the coding.

Your journey starts in a frustrating fog shrouded house with many locked doors that can't be opened and the opening puzzle (together with the last one) would seem to me to be the hardest - the latter in particular (in the Catacombs) requires the use of a verb that I have never utilised previously in a text adventure. The "king of the jungle" riddle is clever in its construction but somewhat of a non sequitur. A brace of puzzles also involve unclued hanging around; this is made more flagrant as the game will often chastise you for tarrying in most places. The EXAMINE command is present but I only managed to find one place where it produced anything other than "you see nothing special" which makes its existence pretty redundant. Inventory limits are seven and mercifully there are no timers involved.

Once through the mists your trip takes you from jungle to ruined city, from underwater gardens to ancient Rome and on to a future world full of cryogenics, unstable reactors and droids. Julius Caesar, a medieval jester and a nervous octopus as well as Spiderman make their guest appearances along the route.

The separate sections of the game are reachable via a time machine which is cleverly interwoven into the story and there is also a transport system for moving booty and machine parts around which saves a lot of leg work although it is possible to retrace your steps manually if you have missed anything along the route.

The game also has a wonderful sense of humour; just try smoking the cigar or examining the ashes. The adventure developer's room is also very funny.

A planned sequel putatively entitled Bostafer's Revenge was mooted but never came to fruition.

The game claims to have had multiple beta testers. One wonders what it was like previously as I counted four typographical howlers on the opening page, including "sandwitch" for "sandwich" which must be spelled incorrectly to be taken. Even the score update template is misspelled (***your score just cahanged (sic) by 5 points***).

I have hammered this point home so many times. Why spend ages coding a game and not take a few minutes to spell check it at the end? Why claim to be a beta tester when you quite clearly aren't?

Having got that off my chest there is the framework of an interesting story here. It's a shame that I was put off by its slapdash presentation.

A Scottish fly lands on your nose.....a Scottish bug lands on your left ear....and your right ear....and your chin....and your adam's apple....and well, you get the general idea.

I have always liked the "search a mansion to claim your inheritance" style of text adventure encompassing the whole gamut from Hollywood Hijinx to The Mulldoon Legacy and I had meant to try this DOS and C64 effort for some time. This well-trodden premise has you hunting for twelve gold bars and consequently triggering the end game to claim your $10,000,000 dollar inheritance.

I wish now that I had essayed the C64 version as the DOS effort (played via DOSBox-X) elicits a number of bugs, both harmless and game crashing.

There are no self-inflicted fatal mistakes in the game (beyond the bugs) as any potentially life ending moves merely earn a rebuke regarding your lack of adroitness and a continuation from your current position with your inventory still in your possession. The game ending faux pas are all in the coding, dear boy. It is worth paying attention however to the text dumps during your many quasi demises as clues can be hidden therein.

I arrived at the mysterious Durham Airport in Scotland (erm, Durham isn't in Scotland and doesn't have an airport but we'll gloss over that) and was greeted by the butler. I also encountered a winsome french maid called Gisele who promised to meet me afterwards but never did. At the beginning of the game you are asked if you are a laddie or a lassie; I imagine if you choose lassie then the unreliable french maid is replaced by an unreliable valet or similar. Perhaps he/she planned to abscond with the mcmurphy.dat file, the incorrectly reported absence of which causes the game to crash on a random basis. Some exits also loop to wrong locations and mystifyingly the command "TURN CUBE" occasionally elicits, "There is no bathroom in the mansion," or the even more Daliesque, "Everything has now turned yellow."

Other bugs do however crash the game.

Dorothy Millard's solution doesn't work for the puzzle in the kitchen although whether this is another bug or not I am unsure.

I gave up in the end as too many of the little critters made the game unplayable but if the untried Commodore 64 trope plays more smoothly then the DOS version (it could hardly do otherwise) then the game is worth a play as there is a very good game in here trying to get out, albeit one clad in khaki shorts, pith helmet and clutching a can of insect repellent. Some of the puzzle solutions are very clever and the descriptions are rather evocative.

You know you are in trouble with a game when you find "a bottle of weedkiller" and on attempting the inevitable TAKE BOTTLE the game parses: "There is no bottle of gin here!"

If you enter a building right at the start of the game and fail to type SEARCH the bottle of weedkiller (it is on a high shelf) doesn't exist. Yup, if you fail to search for items in a building and destroy the room around it (which you need to do to get the weedkiller off the high shelf) then they don't exist and you have soft locked the game without knowing it. And after your act of Luddism you can leave and re-enter the shed which doesn't exist any more; of course the graphics show it as still virgo intacta. Conditional flags are obviously lacking here.

A creature in a room (e.g. a dead balrog) isn't there if you EXAMINE it. A rickety wooden bridge cannot be examined (there is no rope bridge here) as it applies to the wrong bridge.

The game is studded with so-called scatalogical humour but if you use the same words yourself you are rebuked for your language. A gate cannot be climbed, opened or interacted with in any way. All of this can be suffered in the first handful of rooms.

This "game" was written in POOR. Sorry, PAW.

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 all are outside the drop items to map variety, a subtle 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.

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.

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.

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.

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