Ratings and Reviews by Canalboy

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.

Magnus Olsson is perhaps best known for writing Uncle Zebulon's Will, a game which won the TADS division at the First Annual IF Competition in 1995. Four years earlier he had completed The Dungeons of Dunjin, a very large cave crawl written in Pascal which had taken him five years to hone into a shape which he considered releasable. The effort involved is very evident in the polished nature of the game, its home brew parser putting most other efforts at text adventure self sufficiency to shame.

The aim of the game is diverse: part treasure hunt for the Holy Grail and sundry other valuables; part odyssey to rescue a princess and part dragon slayer.

I played the DOS release via DOSBox-X and it is a long time since I played a game of this size which has scarcely a typographical or grammatical error anywhere. Considering the game has almost 200 locations and pretty verbose room descriptions this is laudable, even more so when you consider the author wasn't even writing in his first language.

You start off as so often in a forest (yes, really) and explore fifteen odd locations featuring tunnels, an office and a cottage. Magnus obviously has a vicarious feel for player sensitivities as the problems early on are pretty straightforward and you should soon find yourself underground and ready to explore a Zorkian/Crowtheresque landscape of caves.

The game features many locked doors and gates, some of which require keys (there are lots of 'em) and some incantations to breach them. Rather cleverly the whole map links up after a while and therefore negates the need for endless peregrinations across the map. It is to the writer's credit that he manages to park incongruous settings next to each other (a computer room next to a reservoir for instance) without it seeming like a hash of ideas just plonked together.

There are an awful lot of items to port about, in fact nearly 70 and despite the generous inventory limit you will still have to work out where to mass the unused ones without cutting off the path back to them later on; this ceases to be a problem when short cuts are discovered.

As you progress the problems become much more difficult and towards the end I was saving often as I experimented and screwed up on a regular basis.

The author states that his home made parser isn't up to Infocom standards but even so it is better than the one in many commercial games of an earlier time. HELP is available early on if you want it but apparently ceases to work later on. In fact using it crashes the game back to a DOS prompt - one of the few examples of a bug in the game. TAKE ALL is catered for and X for examine, L for look although there is no UNDO. The multi word parser occasionally struggled when speaking with NPCs but not in a game breaking way. The coding must be extremely clever as there are so many changes in location and object statuses along the way. Most of the descriptions are well done with only a few perfunctory "you are in an east-west tunnel" locations and I felt fully immersed in the world due to the high standards of writing. The realism of the game is augmented by the fact that magic only works in certain places, so the mundanity of the world outside the magic gates is a clever juxtaposition. The intensity of the mission you have undertaken is lightened by some welcome shafts of humour; PRAY and you will think of Zork and a "hands and knees tunnel" took me straight back to Colossal Cave. I also liked the plastic skull with "Made In Taiwan" written on it. There is also a puzzle with a knowing wink towards Sweden's second biggest ever export after Volvo.

The NPCs in the game include dwarves, trolls, a princess, a demon and a warlock. There is not a great deal of colloquy between the player and these other crepuscular characters which is a slight weakness. As in a lot of games the other characters are really there as puzzles or lubricants in the flow of the story rather than as flesh and blood entities.

I have seldom played a game with so much scope for soft and hard locking oneself out of victory. You can find yourself in one corner of the map and stranded in an Andy Phillips kind of way early on- later as you find short cuts this problem largely goes away. There are quite a few red herrings as well as items that have multiple uses so throw nothing away. At least there is no lamp timer or any hunger/thirst/time daemons. One puzzle involving the transportation of a wood table would be at home in a Peter Killworth game in its toughness and some of the magic words require considerable leaps of intuition. Save often. Most are very clever and not too taxing to solve and some are tough and clever. Drawing a map is essential for some of the logistical puzzles. Many of the puzzles revolve around magic words and character traits, and it is very important to read all the information that can be gleaned from the manifold books, scrolls and pieces of paper scattered throughout the game. The denouement of the game is really rather hard and I screwed up on numerous occasions. I know that you can draw a sword but its use (there are two of them) is hardly obvious. There may be a clue in there!

Overall this is a lovely big, tough old-fashioned cave crawl which feels like a mainframe game from the seventies both in demeanour and difficulty. I loved it, even though I felt worn out at the end.

Stonequest is an archetypal "complete quest for king and usurp evil tyrant" adventure which would pass as unremarkable but for possibly the most turgid and unimaginative maze in text adventure history. The game itself is composed of 245 rooms, 200 of which are a stone maze with unclimbable walls; there is a magic word that takes you to the maze exit but as you have to thoroughly map it to search for hidden objects that doesn't soften the blow too much.

The game is split into three parts with a codeword issued at the start of parts two and three to enable quick transit to the section you were last in but in these days of emulators and saved game options it is rendered redundant.

Many of the puzzles revolve around pushing furniture, drinking magic potions or saying magic words although there a couple of more imaginative ones, particularly a problem revolving around a canister and a room with green smoke. Many of the commands seem hard coded to the rooms where they work; for instance the trade verb will only work in certain places when talking to one of the game's NPCs. You have to persist with one particular character which may be a clever way of bartering successfully through persistence or may be a bug.

All of your objects are automatically jettisoned when moving from one phase to the next so at least you don't have to worry too much about applying manifold items to a puzzle or an inventory limit. The parser is a two word effort - it understands TAKE ALL but not "oops" or "back." The writing is reasonable but most rooms are merely backdrops to the puzzles. The first section is the largest and has the most varied geography and character interaction. When playing on the Altirra 4.21 emulator in CIO mode the game crashed at the end of part one but worked ok via 4.30. You can soft lock youself out of winning; howeverv this will be evident soon after the erroneous action. Unusually for a game of this vintage there are no dark areas and no lamp timer and no thirst or hunger daemons so feel free to wander randomly without any time pressure.

The denouement features a nice homage to one of the most famous sketches from Monty Python's Flying Circus. Personally I've never pressed wild flowers.

Où sont les neiges d'antan? It must be said that I had many a Proustian moment replaying this excellent Level 9 offering. It is 42 years since I purchased it for my Atari 800 amidst my 'A' levels at school back in 1983. Back in those distant days of The Tube on Channel Four and Gabichi golfing sweaters as the iconic fashion statement of the time I loaded up this game on my dodgy Atari tape recorder. It took about a quarter of an hour to load, if it loaded at all (about half the time it crashed) and I spent many an evening battling against carnivorous jellies when I should have been studying. Chivers give you shivers.

The DOS version essayed here is an enhanced one on the old Middle Earth offering e.g. it understands EXAMINE and UNDO but the Tolkien references are gone in the repackaged game so no Minas Tirith; this does not affect immersion in a detrimental fashion. Dungeon Adventure proffers a massive map of over 200 locations, cleverly crafted puzzles and as Gunness from CASA has noted, an eerily evocative and claustrophobic feel is engendered - steps and skeletal hands crumble; rats, corpses and slime proliferate the dungeons; there are no friendly faces (with one exception) to share the burden here and the oppressiveness and sense of isolated choice works extremely well. The descriptions are broodingly evocative and there is barely a typo to wince at as you pick your way through the Dantesque devastation, although in one location a statue may only be recognised as a sculpture. Occasional shafts of dry humour pierce the oppressive prose. What do rats flee?

Having just completed the game again I think I would taxonomise it as a game of medium difficulty. At the time it was probably the hardest game I had played but subsequent sufferings at the hands of the Phoenix authors have made me reassess its difficulty quotient. Some puzzles have multiple solutions too and there are a few outrageous puns as well as a handful of sudden death locations as well as an appearance by Zorro.

There is a very clever set piece section of the game in the central dungeon which comprises a huge spiral ramp, down upon which the Demon Lord used to watch the Middle Earth equivalent of the Christians versus the lions battle a series of life or death puzzles; all this from the vicarious comforts of his Viewing Gallery. Collect 9 gems and escape. In all there are 35 treasures to ransack from the ruins all around you and many have a more than monetary worth. There is also a very useful teleportation system employing a hierarchical structure of coloured collars which save a lot of backtracking. If only the Epic games had this facility! Another user-friendly factor is the rematerialisation of your temporary light source when it expires. A more permananent source of illumination can be found deeper into the game.

The parser is an improvement on the original 1982 release. TAKE ALL, UNDO and EXAMINE all work as does RAMSAVE. Multiple commands may be entered and most items may be referred to.

The puzzles contained herein vary from the obvious to more laterally challenging set pieces and it is commendable that there is little repetition involved in puzzle solving.

There is much about the game which is even more user friendly in the repackaged version than the original 1982 offering as explained above. One particularly friendly feature is the fact that your entire inventory can be ported about with you inside a magical object. Add this to the teleportation system together with no solitary lamp timer and you have a very user friendly experience all round.

Four decades cannot wither the game, nor Twine stale its infinite variety. This remains one of the very best puzzlefests ever created.