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Review
This is a Larry Horsfield game, and his games follow a pretty specific pattern. There are 32 games listed on IFDB and 20 listed in-game as part of the series this game is in (and side-series). Larry is a prolific author of large games; if an author’s work was measured by the total sum of all moves necessary to win all games, he might be near the top (this game, while large by usual standards, is comparatively small, requiring only a few hundred moves rather than the thousands of some of his other games).
Like the others, this is an ADRIFT game, and it shares with them the classic opening castle setup that I now have memorized (a suite of rooms where extremely important items must be found by looking under beds or, a favorite place, on the mantelpiece of a fireplace), a building layout of east-west hallways connected by vertical stairs, the dungeon in the middle of the bottom floor, a long row of dungeon cells (which I was amused to see were being refurbished into guest rooms). Then a portal to a faraway land where we wander through a forest, town and castle.
I followed my normal protocol of playing as far as I can (in this case, I got to the dungeon with the ringbolts and got stuck) and then using the walkthrough for the rest. The game (as it says in the opening screen) requires you to frequently look on doors or at parts of the room not in the initial description (like walls or roof beams). That’s not unreasonable, but there are dozens or hundreds of rooms each with a lot of furniture. I went through tons of rooms looking at each door and closing each door and looking under every bed and every table. I later discovered my error was that I should have, in one specific room, (Spoiler - click to show)looked behind a door.
Deviating from the walkthrough can cause problems. I got a pop-up ADRIFT error when I tried to DROP ALL because I had been carrying a non-droppable item since the beginning of the game (the (Spoiler - click to show)fossy whereas the walkthrough had instructed me to put it in my pocket. Similarly, I couldn’t (Spoiler - click to show)CLEAN or RUB a tombstone, I could only CLEAR the IVY on it. The games are completable without the walkthrough, as in other ways they are eminently fair (most areas don’t have much available so you can exhaustively search everything), it just requires quiet patience, a sense of enjoyment from trying different parser commands to discover the right ones (a VERBS list is helpful) and the willingness to try very many unhelpful searches while waiting to find the rare diamonds in the rough where it is valuable.
None of this is meant as criticism for the author to follow; with 20 games into the series and decades of stories in the universe, it’s clear this is a labor of love that will be made exactly as the author wants. It’s just a general description for players new to the Lazzahverse. I’ve never regretted playing these games, and generally give them fairly high ratings, because they do have a sense of adventure and of a living, evolving universe.
