Ratings and 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.

Dan Gahlinger is to be congratulated on his memory in recreating this long lost old VAX mainframe program. It has a lot of potential as a large, old style puzzle fest if the game is properly tested and more items available to EXAMINE.

It is unfortunately very buggy. Examining an item often gives the description of a different item you may not have found yet. EXAMINE PLANK gives you the description of a plastic card for instance, and the white candle carries the description of a bar of soap.

THROW BOTTLE caused the game to crash with a run time error. There are also numerous typos throughout the descriptions.

The best part of the game is the maze, which is described as unmappable but contains hundreds of witty sayings and gnomisms from down the ages; everything from old Jewish Jokes to Woody Allen observations.

The version is displayed as 3.5 developmental and hopefully can be redone by the author.

An update as of 21/11/24 - the links to this game provided by the updater are now broken.

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.

At last. After 25 years on and off, 1,713 little blue tablets and umpteen visits to my psychiatrist I have beaten Hezarin.

This old mainframe game only survives as a port by Jon Thackray to the BBC under the auspices of Topologika and the beta testing of Peter Killworth back in 1990 but thank goodness it does as it must be the ultimate treasure gathering / picaresque odyssey of a text adventure game ever coded by mortal hand. It shares a lot of early IF tropes with its big brother Acheton; size, head bashing toughness, manifold opportunities to screw up without realising it and sudden death scenarios a plenty. However, unlike its forebear there are few mazes and most refreshing of all no lamp timer.

It was the fourth of the original 16 games written for the old IBM mainframe nicknamed "Phoenix" and despite my previous observations is still certainly one of the toughest from this stable, which really is saying something as they are universally didactic and always paddled against the mainstream of IF even as the eighties wore on and such hidebound shibboleths became at best uncool and at worst subject to the most vehement of derision. One suspects that the neophytes' jeers ruffled nary an intellectual feather with the Phoenix crowd.

The game itself is based on the old Mesopotamian epic poem the Epic Of Gilgamesh, although no prior knowledge of the poem is needed to solve it. Just patience, a keen eye for detail and pen and paper to note down clues on the way (or stab yourself with maybe). Oh yes and about two and a half decades of spare time as this thing sprawls over 300+ rooms and (by my reckoning) 86 objects. There are 1100 points to be gained and 45 treasures as well. If you manage to complete the game with a full quota of points there is an extra dump of information on the screen.

In the manner of the day treasure items are suffixed by an exclamation mark.

Hezarin will take you on a quest through several regions, that is in an area of fields by a village, an underground cave complex with a central cavern, another area of caves with its own fountain cavern, shifting halls, a dragon maze, a wild wood, desolate moorland, an ivory temple, a castle....and so on and on, deep into the night if you are like me.

The game has the standard Phoenix two word parser but atypically the examine command is useable and you will need it on more than one occasion. The inventory list is seven but there is a receptacle available somewhere to augment this number.

You don't so much play Hezarin as strap on an extraordinarily heavy suit of armour, oversharpen your figurative lance, clutch your Vorpal Blade and physically assault the thing. Be prepared to die or softlock and restart a thousand and one times. Unlike its predecessors from this stable the game will however sometimes show you mercy when you die, commenting "Would you like me to pretend you hadn't done that?" Upon commenting yes, it replies, "Alright, but be more careful next time!"

There are several puzzles which I would consider unfair here; as previously noted pretty much the norm for the Phoenix stable. Soft lockouts really do abound, and there is an horrifically cruel trick in one smoke filled corridor where using the save command renders the exit unreachable but beyond a description of an earth tremor this is not at all made clear. Another puzzle revolves around noting down part of a room description that only appears the first time you enter it (the music room) and this then needs to be interpreted and applied much later in the game. There is no hint as to the necessity of doing this. Another requires you to invoke an old piece of speleological slang which I was not familiar with. Think Bedquilt in Colossal Cave. And then there's the inn sign.....you get the general idea.

There is a graduated hint system which you access by typing HELP and referring to the appropriate problem number. A list of problems can be found under https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/phoenix/manuals/Doom3_Hezarin.pdf

Good luck (you'll need it!)

There are many NPCs in the game, nearly all of whom want to do you in and several laugh out loud moments as well. If you are not English one of them may go over your head, but the centuries old mural depicting shaven-headed, peace loving monks doing over some Millwall supporters had me in stitches. And the three bickering witches are hilarious too. I also liked the Adventurers' Lounge and Bar, complete with weary adventurers and serving wenches.

The denouement of the game involves a dangerous sequence of cat and mouse manoeuvering with the wizard Anjith and the final puzzle, fittingly, is extremely fiendish but certainly sums up the whole game. It rather reminds me of a much earlier Andy Phillips type sequence.

I estimate that the game consists of 402 rooms which would make it exactly 1 room smaller than Acheton. Whether this was deference or coincidence I am not sure; the fact that one of the treasures is the Acheton Database leads me to suspect it is the former.

It ran very smoothly in DosBox although I did manage to crash the game three times, when jumping from the east side of the air duct, throwing objects when in the air and attempting to open an object with the sword. Unusually for Phoenix games there are also a few typos.

If you have played other games from this stable you'll certainly know what to expect. If you get impatient boiling a kettle or cutting a sandwich you'd best avoid this multiple course banquet of frustration and essay reloading a modern game.

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.

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 fifteen games written on the Phoenix mainframe; it was created in 1980 by 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.

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.