Undercover

This spy caper from the early nineties has an interesting premise but is let down badly by non-intuitive puzzle solutions, an exasperatingly intractable CAC, sorry GAC parser and arthritically slow response times even with the occasional graphics switched off (type "graphics" or "text" to toggle.)

The premise is that you have awoken in a dimly lit cellar armed with nothing but a lit candle (which amazingly never goes out whatever you do or however long you take to do it) and a vague recollection of being a superspy on your biggest assignment ever. Upon making your exit from the cellar you find yourself in a snow-laden town with only a handful of locations to initially visit. This is the kind of game where you solve puzzles one by one rather than being able to pick and mix; as a result it is very easy to get bogged down when the latest non sequitur problem stumps you and believe me there are lots of them. The ending was quite amusing but I honestly don't think I'll be playing another William Quinn game for a while. It is more Basildon Bond than James Bond. The parser is also limited in scope and the endless "You Can't" responses to perfectly valid commands quickly become tedious. There are precious few if any synonyms available; to give one inexcusable example of the sloppy coding, you find an overcoat but the game doesn't understand the word "overcoat" only "coat." There are other similar examples.

The terse descriptions and several NPCs that you can't talk to do not help to create any kind of taut, espionage-like atmosphere and the forty odd locations are all described in a utilitarian fashion. I kept with it as there was at least some kind of story developing but it doesn't really amount to much in the end. The crude and sporadic pictures bring nothing to the party neither. Add static, taciturn NPCs and the resulting mix is anything but heady. The low inventory limit is exacerbated by the slow speed of the game. TAKE ALL, OOPS and any kind of verbal interaction with the other characters that you meet are missing, which you would think would be a bit of a problem to a superspy. Each puzzle is like a fence in a horse race; fail to solve it and you're going nowhere. Even more annoying is the balloon which cannot be referred to after it has been inflated and if you attempt to use a certain container more than once you cannot ever drop it again so it just gums up your inventory for the rest of the game. Many legitimate actions won't work except in one carefully designated location which makes you think you're barking up the wrong tree with your attempted solution and a lot of the puzzle solutions don't make sense. The solutions to problems like gaining access to the cinema (why can you go in past the ticket booth without a ticket but not past a tramp walking about?) avoiding being killed when going to sleep and creating the right scenario to be able to watch the film all make no sense to me. The strange tree problem, the eight sided cabinet (whose existence is never explained) the sleep problem and the film problem are similarly surreal in the solution and I ended up solving problems by brute forcing them. A car jack won't work anywhere logically so I just wandered around the map trying it on every meta object until it worked on something incongruous; this isn't a very fulfilling way of playing these games. The rocketbelt would have been more fun if it had worked in more than one area. I can't in all honesty recommend this; if you want to play a decent spy caper try the Rick Hanson trilogy by Robico.