Ratings and Reviews by David Whyld

This one had an introduction at least, though the author’s spelling and grammar haven't improved much since Escape From The House. Nor has his ability to know where capitals are and are not needed. And he’s still a long, long way from writing something even vaguely playable…

Quest has the strange habit of displaying the items (both ones you can pick up and immovable ones) in bold type before the main body of the text in the room description, which is a bad idea to say the least and compounded here by the author then going on to repeat most of what you have already been told. So the first room description reads:

You are in the main Garden.
There is a closed Well, some Yellow Flowers, some White Flowers, some Red Flowers and some Blue Flowers here.
You can go west.
You are standing in a small garden. There is a large well here and it is overgrown with colourful flowers

As I've already been told there's a well and some flowers here, is it really necessary to incorporate them into the room description as well?

What age the game is in set I couldn’t say. At one time you are given gold coins, which led me to assume it was way back in the Dark Ages, but at the same time you're given a photograph so it’s clearly not a medieval game. Unfortunately the author doesn’t seem willing to elaborate on things. Then again, little about the game is clear. For a start: who is the player? The background to the game is that someone called Annabel has gone missing (this is detailed in the remarkably clumsy introduction) and you have to find her, yet whether you're a police officer, a freelance detective or something else altogether is never indicated. Part of me suspects even the author doesn’t know.

I didn’t last long with Where’s Annabel? Mainly because it was just so bad I was on the verge of quitting before I’d even finished reading the introduction, but also because of the remarkably small amount of commands it understands and the frequent bugs. Not to mention some of the worst guess the verb problems I've ever come across. A good example of this would be:

You're given a photograph of Annabel. Now with a photograph, the logical thing to do would be to SHOW it to people, right? Ah, but the game doesn’t understand the SHOW command. It does understand GIVE funnily enough but won’t let me give it away because I need to keep hold of it. USE PHOTOGRAPH when speaking to an NPC called Baggie produces an unhelpful message that I can’t use it here. At this I got stumped and started typing in silly things just to see if I could hit upon the solution by sheer luck. And I did. The command required?

USE PHOTOGRAPH ON BAGGIE

Ah, of course. What an amazingly obvious command. USE PHOTOGRAPH ON BAGGIE is so much better than SHOW PHOTOGRAPH.

Okay, enough with the sarcasm and enough with the game. Avoid this one like the stinker it is.