Ratings and Reviews by Canalboy

This is the second of the Rick Hanson trilogy and is another excellent offering from the O'Leary stable. This time Rick is sent to steal some secret plans to prevent the enemy creating a particle beam accelerator or something (or was it an everlasting light bulb?). I never was very good at Physics or Chemistry.

At any rate Rick is the lad for the job again and you find yourself dripping wet on a beach dressed like Jacques Cousteau after being beached by the submersible equivalent of Calypso (is that John Denver I hear in the background?) The usual tension laden story spins out before you: exploding trunks; ominously swooping helicopters; a psychotic guard dog and coded newspaper articles await our go to espionage man as he travels through a meandering village, a confusing forest and a mine-laden beach with guard dogs snapping at his twinkling feet.

The parser is adequate rather than envelope pushing and the game uses the proprietory MIDGE compression system which crams a quart of words into a 32K BBC pint pot. I occasionally had problems knowing whether a verb was genuinely not understood at all or needed a transitive object to be understood; one such example occurred on the rocky pinnacle towards the climax of the game. Multiple commands on one line are theoretically parseable but in my experience they often cause more trouble than they are worth. Examining an object often produces a description followed by a default "you see nothing special." Stick to the basic two or three word commands would be my suggestion. Synonyms are often ok e.g. "paper" and "newspaper" are both accepted. UNDO, SCORE and VERBOSE are all missing but EXAMINE ALL is unusually and usefully available although I found that the full list of results sometimes disappeared off the top of the screen when using the B-Em emulator when more than seven or eight items were examinable at any one time. The MIDGE compressor, allied with Mr. O'Leary's excellent prose style and story book imagination have helped to create a very well-written and pulse quickening espionage game. There is seldom less than six lines of descriptive text through approximately 210 locations and often a lot more but the output never feels flabby. By way of contrast some of the paths and roads run across more locations than is strictly necessary but this scarcely dilutes the tautness of the action, so well written is the game. The dry mouthed moments when Rick stares danger in the face manage to stay on the right side of farce; Rick is more Sean Connery than Roger Moore and there are no fourth wall destroying winks to the crowd. I would have settled for "nasty" rather than "cruel" for the overall player experience if it wasn't for one completely motivationless action which needs to be performed in the winding lanes of Witherton village; I tried it out of a sense of mischief and was very surprised to find that the result was in fact essential for completion of the game. Do you remember Ray Steven's hit record in 1974? No, not Misty; that was '75...

Unusually for a Robico game there are three mazes and the village maze is a colossal pain in the lane. There are considerably fewer objects than locations and I had to continually map and save, map and restore and gradually join up the many similar locations. The other two mazes both have hints to help you find a way through without the need to fully map them but the first of these (the forest) requires a somewhat odd interpretation of the clock face (to me, anyway). You may also get stuck for something to do in places as it is the kind of game where not solving a particular problem can stop you dead in your tracks.

As usual for Robico there are no light/hunger/thirst/time daemons or inventory barriers to worry about and quite rightly so. Who enjoys a meal in a restaurant when you can only book the table for an hour?

This isn't the kind of game with a puzzle in every room; rather it is a thumping good spy yarn where the (mostly excellent) puzzles integrate holistically with the plot. My personal favourite is the guard dog problem; I was stuck for ages at this point, then had one of those eureka moments. It is a very clever two part puzzle and involves lateral thinking when manipulating an item in your inventory then working out where to use it. Apart from the aforementioned moon logic puzzle in the village all the solutions are I believe fair and logical. There are code puzzles, pursuit puzzles and Grizzly Adams type puzzles to scratch your head over.

Skullduggery is a pretty obscure piece of revenge horror written initially in C for the Apple II by the author then later revised and released in DOS; there are two versions out there, both from 1989. The one with the October date mark is the one to plump for.

It would make the top ten of several personal text adventure taxonomies: hardest games; most atmospheric offerings; best horror scenarios. It may have helped being English as the game is set in Southeast England in the eighteenth century days of smuggling.

You start off, like so many games, in a forest and the opening section is a race against time to find a light source before dark. This isn't the kind of game that gives you any purchase when moving in the dark. Even entering a dark room from a light one it's Goodnight Vienna.

As you explore the ghost-riddled mansion (there are many effective random messages pertaining to the undead) you can discover various writings which will hopefully point you in the direction of your quest. The gradual unfolding of the family history of the Leominsters and Bradys reminded me very much of the revision you undertake in Curses and The Mulldoon Legacy to discover the family skeletons, both literal and metaphorical.

David Jewett is a very effective writer and I found the backstory fascinating. It isn't often you get a happy melding of puzzlefest (assemble the ingredients for a potion) and narrative (strong familial plot line) but I think he pulls it off admirably here.

It is a large game containing more than 100 locations and many objects to manipulate but the size doesn't feel bloated just for the sake of gasconnade (I'm looking at you Epic Adventures). The parser accepts full sentences in some cases but there is no OOPS or UNDO. PUT X ON Y is not the same as PUT X IN Y and the difference is important in a couple of places. You can use TAKE ALL, DROP ALL and VERBOSE. There are no scoring or light or hunger/thirst daemons which can only be a good thing. EXAMINE is available.

I did sometimes struggle to carry out certain actions which were obvious prerequisites i.e. the parser doesn't understand FILL but you need to carry liquids in more than one container in the course of the game. PUT X in Y does the trick however. I also hit a disambiguation problem relating to the two notes in the game. My advice is don't read or take the butler's note until you have found the other one or you will not be able to read both. There are synonyms available for some objects.

The game's major selling point is an above average back story. The horror theme is cloyingly omnipresent here, whether in a dusty old attic or the middle of a forest clearing. Ghosts and the undead stalk indoors and outdoors here and close encounters are very often of the "bugger I've been beheaded" kind:
"A chill descends. Suddenly a shimmering white light in the shape of a man seems to step out from nowhere. As you watch, the shape glares back at you. The ghost's lips are moving and it seems to be forming words; but no sound emerges."

Other random deaths occur at the teeth of a pack of wolfdogs or a poltergeist who hurls items of mansion furniture at you. Keep on the move!
Some of the descriptions are rather long but never long-winded and careful attention should be paid to architectural features as they carry a clue to a recurring puzzle inside the mansion. The map layout is a credible one with no computer rooms plonked down next to a mangrove swamp for example. This helps to heighten the tension.

It must be said that this is a ball-breakingly difficult challenge. Some of the clues carried in the various bits of paper, parchments etc. are quite obtuse and it took me a long time to work out what to do with the bodies that can be moved around the map, although mercifully there aren't many opportunities to make the thing unwinnable without realising it. The transportation system was the single biggest impasse for me as the object(s) utilised for teleportation are not exactly obvious. You can also only pass once through the iron gate outside the mansion's grounds and working out how to get back subsequently requires very careful mapping of the environs; the solution is a very clever logistical puzzle. One novel and also welcome feature is an online map which occupies the left half of the screen.

The inventory limit is weight, not number based which adds to the feeling of authenticity and requires working out what to take on specific sorties and what to leave back at base. One annoyance is the random closing of doors when you enter rooms; there are many of them and constantly having to re-open them becomes tedious after a while.

There was apparently a hint system available from the author for $10 which provided you with a decoder to type for instance CLUE X to find out the use of a particular item or room. As this was first offered 36 years ago I somehow doubt it is still possible to get it.

I had a problem restoring saved positions via DOSBox-X until I upgraded the version to the latest and the problem went away. You can also save up to ten positions (0-9) with the SAVE command. There aren't an enormous number of puzzles given the size of the map but they are often rather clever and often rather obscure as previously intimated. Some of the potion ingredients that need to be garnered require very careful reading of items and room descriptions; small anatomical/architectural details are sometimes essential to progress and easy to miss. There are also several red herrings scattered throughout the game. Finding the links between the various diaries/parchments etc. found and physical objects is not always easy; experimentation is the name of the game. As mentioned the logistical puzzle around finding a way back to the mansion after visiting the forest is very clever and likewise the exportation of an object back from where you find it to the room where you need it is also well-developed.

Unfortunately this is one of those games where you can come to a sudden halt if stymied by certain puzzles. Don't be afraid to drink anything you can lay your hands on bu the way!

I really enjoyed Skullduggery although I can't in all honesty recommend it to adventuring neophytes; indeed many gnarled and cynical adventurers (like myself) will struggle in certain places too. It is a very polished and clever game but you won't be finishing it quickly.

Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors is the largest game in John R. Olsen's trilogy of horror games collectively entitled Nightmare From The Crypt. It has all the usual hallmarks of his genre: compact size; timer; many puzzles; two word parser and excellent presentation both grammatically and typographically.

The aim of the game is to collect the ten keys of virtue and escape from the Doctor's horror museum intact. Many of the rooms contain a waxwork interpretation of a gruesome scene from history (for example there is an Americana Wing featuring a Wild West hanging and a Louisiana Bayou monster). There is the odd real horror element thrown into the mix which works rather well and tends to shake you out of your "it's all made of wax" lethargy.

The starting puzzle in the cell with the closing walls is of course a well-worn trope; I can remember it being used in Will Hay's wonderful film The Ghost Of St. Michael's back in 1941.

Several of the keys are very easy to come across but four or five are more tricky and procuring the lead key in particular is quite a hard chaining conundrum.

The two word parser is adequate as the game doesn't really need to push the lexicographical envelope. There is no "oops" or "take all" and no score neither. There are no bugs here as such and scarcely any misspellings although as an Englishman I had to remember the U.S. spellings (aluminum instead of aluminium for example).

I like the green on black display that is the default for DOSBox-X. Synonyms are sometimes available ("axe" as well as "battleaxe" for example).

The room descriptions are generally of short to perhaps medium length and fairly evocative. John has essayed a wide variety of clichéd horror tropes from a guillotining (sadly without the old lady tricoteuses) in revolutionary France to an extra-terrestrial tentacled monster. Blood, skulls, other mementos mori and the usual panoply of grand guignol impedementa abound.

Occasional random messages flash up such as "a soft giggling emanates from somewhere" and "you hear a creaking floorboard nearby. Is there someone else in here?" These are quite effective in augmenting the spooky feel of your surroundings.

Soft locks are I think completely absent. There are various ways to kill yourself but none are unfair. If you choose to enter a pit filled with live scorpions then you can probably guess your fate. The inventory limit is a bit of a pain but given the compact size of the game a silo for dumping all your objects is never far away, even on the peripheries of the map.

There is no light source but a thirst daemon is invoked; this only becomes a problem after many, many moves. One drink and it never reappears. You initially have no idea how to escape from the museum but an NPC will appear and fill you in about halfway through your odyssey.

Some puzzles consist of nothing more layered than "pull lever" while a few are quite clever. The puzzle(s) pertaining to the acquisition of the lead key are the hardest I think. There is one wanton act of vandalism which I originally eschewed trying as an act of Luddism being the solution seemed too unlikely; you will recognise this when you confront it. I liked the old fashioned moviola machine in which you can insert quarters and watch films containing clues to the game.

This is a game of easy to medium difficulty and would be a good choice for an adventuring newcomer.

The time travel dream-as-narrative has, of course a long and distinguished history in literature - H.G. Wells, Charles Dickens and J.B. Priestley (if you haven't read the latter's play Time And The Conways I thoroughly recommend it) being just three authors to pontificate on its effects on a small scale and a consequential universal level; tiny ripples in the time stream can have tsunami-like consequences. In J. Robinson Wheeler's imagining of this trope tall oaks do indeed from little acorns grow; literally and figuratively.

The game plays out over several interconnected yet discrete time zones, each overlapping and striving to exert influence over each other. Much experimentation and juxtaposition of locations within these worlds is necessary to influence and move the excellent back story on (or back, if you see what I mean).

Much like Curses (there is even a tourist map of Paris included as an homage) the catalyst for this vast historical triage is prosaic and seemingly innocuous; you have mislaid your front door key after returning home from a trip to the local library where you borrowed a book about time travel. A quick shifty of your immediate surroundings unearths a key but, of course, not the one you were looking for. Cue a saga of time machines, corporate behemoths sweeping away the rural arcadia of your home town, corporate takeovers and crystal grottoes, architects and antique merchants. You ultimately have the power of fate over more than one character in the game.

Appropriately for the intricate and multi-faceted gameplay there are several different endings possible, as well as an easter egg and multiple solutions to several of the problems that you will encounter.

The author has done his best to make an exceedingly complex coding exercise as user friendly as possible, although it is still possible to render the game unfinishable in quite a few ways. Save often and remember to amass the winding inventory in an obvious central hub location for easy access; this should be axiomatic once said location is discovered.

As in games like Anchorhead, the narrative is automatically advanced in (sometimes large) screen dumps when certain tasks are completed. If you find yourself stuck, try leaping around the eras and see if anything has changed since your last visit. The central storage silo is a very welcome constituent in an extremely kinetic work; this is a game which was harder to code than it is to play; that is just as it should be.

If I am being picky Wheeler's world view and political leanings are trowelled on a bit too thickly in places but this is a minor quibble. No-one could accuse Wells of letting his political light flicker under a bushel, after all.

I found almost no instance (perhaps with the exception of the lack of insert) where I had to play hunt the verb/noun. Meta objects are almost all examinable. I did manage to find a couple of bugs (one involving wheeling a barrow) and a handful of typos but this is a very well-groomed piece indeed. Unusually, there a few very strong NPCs with whom you will need to interact; indeed the gleaning and passing of knowledge will be essential to your ultimate triumph. One optional piece of philanthropy near the end is very satisfying too.

Given the pedigree of the author the descriptions are predictably top notch. Unpretentiously evocative writing is a difficult skill to master, sway too far one way and you can end up creating a lurid penny dreadful; too far the other way and things can seem too surgical, too literal; this one manages to land perfectly between two stools.

Several of the puzzles herein garnered awards and award nominations. Almost none are unfair although one or two are hard to swallow logically. Complex chaining puzzles which wax and wane through the ages are dealt with adroitly. This is a masterful work which can hold its own against any of the great text adventures. It won't be a wrench (or, indeed, a spanner) to play it.

Heist is one of Andy Phillips's mid-era exercises in masochism. It is more user friendly than his earler TATCTAE but then that wouldn't be difficult. Each section contains several chances to soft lock yourself out of victory however, as well as a few instances of moon logic. The final section veers into the murky depths of surreal images, floating shapes and ridiculously obtuse puzzles that make William Burroughs look like Enid Blyton. Just save a lot. Don't do like I did initially and forget to take your bag with you as you will need it to carry all necessary items into the elevator with you.

The game revolves around your incipient skills as a master crook, urged on by your dead and unpopular uncle from his graveside. The transformation from nervous teenage ingénue to grizzled burglar is somewhat difficult to swallow but leave credibility aside and enjoy the thrill of the chase. Over several pre-planned scenarios you must prove yourself up to the final challenge, stealing the Crown Jewels of Denario, via a cruise liner, a locked museum, a top security nuclear base and an assassination at a disused airbase. There are many many ways to come a cropper before you emerge toughened and ready for the big showpiece heist.

Having said that, there is still something addictive about Andy's games that keeps me from throwing in the towel. All one hundred and twenty-eight locations of it in this case.

The parser is generally adequate with a handful of exceptions. Gag for instance should be implemented in one place but isn't. There is another puzzle with a sweet that lacks an appropriate verb. On the whole though the interaction is pretty exhaustive and smooth.

Andy's prose is occasionally awkward, often when he is on his anti-capitalism and "workers of the world unite" soap boxes.

The number of typos and other grammatical faux pas seem to increase as you approach the denouement, somewhat akin to the last few yards of the mountaineer approaching his summit I suppose.

As with all of Andys' games it is extremely easy to miss an item you need or misuse one you have already found. We are approaching seventies mainframe levels of unfairness here. Pay particular attention to messages given (often only once) and examine and search everything. Some vital meta objects are not described in the initial room decription and you really need to drill down to the nuts and bolts (sometimes literally) of an object to be sure that you haven't overlooked something.

The real saving grace of the game and indeed his entire oeuvre are the clever puzzles. Several have been award nominated down the years and they are easily his strong suit. There are some cracking ideas in here and some very entertaining action sequences. Unfortunately there are also quite a few head scratchers that I solved knowing that they didn't really make sense; you get to lock into the author's mind set after a while. The solution to making one's egress from the Countess's bedroom, for example doesn't seem logical to me.

If you manage to drag yourself exhausted and dripping to the final test there is a nice and somewhat unexpected finale which runs counter to all previous expectations.

Village of Lost Souls is an excellent and rather creepy puzzlefest set in the once sleepy village of Dinham. You play as a fairly important monk named Nathan who has been summoned to commence an investigation into the Council Of Twelve; they are believed to be attempting to open a portal into the forbidden Thirteenth Realm which would bring disorder and chaos. A bit like the Labour Party winning a General Election here in the U.K.

Robico Software, one of the best of the many commercial text adventure software houses that proliferated in the mid-eighties, took a game from another excellent software house called Magus and extensively rewrote and expanded it using their own excellent programming language Amulet, which was both tough to decompile and very good at compressing text; something like 59% compression was achieved and this allows for a very large (220 odd locations) and detailed game to be written and played within the confines of the BBC, Electron and Amstrad.

The opening section of the game (the world map is very open right from the start) involves wandering around and taking in the depressing, almost Lovecraftian desolation of the once sleepy little village. Bloodied corpses and smashed, burned-out buildings stud the landscape and are likely to make you miss an important timed puzzle at the opening of the proceedings. This is the kind of old school game that expects you to learn from making mistakes and having to restart. There are a number of hidden items that require careful searching of every nook and cranny in the game. Map making is a prerequisite in a game of this size and complexity.

The multi word parser is one of the best of its time. While not up to the very finest it allows for "take all," "og" for retracing your steps once and the marvellous and almost unique "examine all" which is a real godsend and will scan every one of the objects, both takeable and non-takeable in your location and in your inventory all in one solitary parser output. Luxury indeed. "Help" will give you a long list of some of the verbs the game understands but there are a lot more that you have to glean for yourself.

I can only remember one spelling mistake which gives you some idea of the attention to detail that has gone into the game. Nearly everything can be examined and there are over seventy items that you will have to carry around or wear at one time or another; there are only a couple of poissons d'avril.

The writing by Martin Moore and Glen McCauley is just as masterly as the parser and the descriptions are both long, compelling and often sinister. The all-pervading feeling of a great darkness working its evil across the land is built up extremely cleverly without lapsing too far into splattergun hysteria. This is M.R. James rather than Sean S. Cunningham and far more effective as a result.

To counterbalance the air of almost tangible evil there is a very dry sense of humour with a fair number of puns thrown in, sometimes even when you've just died. I don't think the cruelty level is quite ratcheted up to eleven on the text adventure synthesizer but it is very easy to miss the importance of a timed puzzle at the beginning and consequently to miss learning a vital part of the plot; suffice to say when you smell smoke follow your nose.

The parser as mentioned is very good at holding your hand and despite its size the more far flung reaches of the map are traversable fairly quickly due to the clever layout of the game. Unusually there are almost no dark areas so no need to worry about conserving a lamp timer and no need to constantly eat or drink. To start with there don't appear to be many puzzles as the game is designed to give you a rather macabre "tour of duty" as you wander around and soak up the desolation and death all around you. There are, apart from the previously mentioned puzzle at the beginning, two other early repetitive problems involving animals; one revolves around a pack of dogs and the other a Raffles-like bird and solving them both quickly makes your life a lot easier; indeed the mangy mongrel can really screw you up so save often. Oh for some Strychnine-laced Winalot but you'll have to make do with something else you find on your travels to get rid of him. The puzzles become more numerous and more difficult as you progress through the game and there is one delightful mechanical chaining puzzle which would sit comfortably alongside a Jonathan Partington or Peter Killworth masterpiece. There is another less satisfactory problem which involves an abuse of the laws of physics while also using a dreadful Star Wars pun as a clue. The pun is a "key" element here.

The exciting denouement of the game involves snowdrifts, demons and a certain mirror and the puzzles come think and fast. Save often. Alomost everything about this game oozes quality; indeed I would recommend any Robico title if you have access to a BBC, Amstrad or Electron simulator. This game was originally to be the first part of the Realm Of Chaos trilogy and indeed the putative second part Communion was well nigh completed and ready for publishing when the company sadly foundered on the late eighties "graphical adventures" iceberg.

In summation this is big, user-friendly and packed with puzzles and humour; all overarched by a very strong back story.