The Axe of Kolt

Crash

"The imagination and thought that’s gone into the puzzles makes the game enjoyably frustrating — if you know what I mean. You’ll need lateral thinking by the bucketful. Even objects you may think have served their use may be needed for a completely different purpose later on. Axe of Kolt is a little gem — the best adventure I’ve played this year."
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Your Sinclair

"From the start I made a couple of moves and with the experience of years of adventuring behind me immediately found myself outside the Dragonslayer's Arms. The bad news was that it was shut, so I wandered off again, found myself a clapper without a bell and returned to the pub just in time to give the landlord a helping hand. This earned me a bed for the night, a meal and all the ale I could sup. This is the life!"
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Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 1 Write a review

The "Axe of Kolt" is a legendary axe that you must recover and give to King Kelson, who has been captured by the evil Xixons ; a standard fantasy setting, played straight and nicely. This ADRIFT version is a remastering of the original ZX Spectrum game which came out in the early 90s; it is not exactly the same game, with some puzzles having been reworked or streamlined, and I think also adapted to modern sensitivities i.e. nicer to the player (which is good!). The game is Polite (or maybe a bit Tough), and you can die quite a few times (though never unfairly), but nothing that can't be solved by undoing a couple of times; the deaths themselves are rather 'pulpy' and I find them enjoyable.

The story itself is nothing special, but the setting is detailed and expansive; there are lots of characters, events, and locations, none of which feel forced or out of place. The world has diverse locations (each of the four acts has its own identity, so to speak), and everything is very thouroughly implemented (disclaimer: I was a beta tester for this game), which makes the whole thing alive. The puzzles themselves are fairly well balanced, though not too easy; most of them are well-clued, although there is inevitably a couple of 'read-the-author's-mind' moments, and there are no 'guess-the-verb' problems and other frustrations like that thanks to the great implementation. It's a long game: each of the four acts will probably take half a dozen hours, and there are a lot of puzzles; the game is also pretty linear, which means you might get stuck sometimes.

Overall, "The Axe of Kolt" is a long, classical text adventure with a nice setting, very good implementation and fair puzzles; it's an old school game that avoids a lot of the old-school pitfalls, and thus suited to modern sensitivities.

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