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Historical fun in more ways than one., August 25, 2013This entertaining and incidentally educational Eamon sees your character plucked from his or her usual fantasy setting and transported to the present day (of 1983) to explore the Tower of London from the perspective of a tourist. The tone is a bit whimsical; your unusual dress and armour don't draw too much attention because the tower is already heavily populated with guards wearing funny traditional costumes and brandishing funny ornamental weapons. Just before you're hurtled through time, a couple of big suggestions are offered as to how you might play:
BECAUSE YOU'VE HEARD RUMOURS OF AN IMPENDING ATTEMPT TO STEAL THE CROWN JEWELS FROM THE TOWER OF LONDON, YOU DECIDE TO GO THERE... TO PREVENT THE THEFT?? OR TO STEAL THEM FOR YOURSELF!!
The only disappointment, then, is that the game doesn't follow up on actions you might have taken towards or away from either of these ends when it reaches its own end. It just finishes with the default "You ride off into the sunset" message and the pawning of your (likely enormous) haul of bounty. It's easy to play either protector or thief, though it's easiest to play both roles at the same time: To both kill all the thieving bad guys you will encounter on the premises, ranging from the pickpocket to the American tourist, and to also grab every treasure that isn't nailed down, including the Crown Jewels.
Tower sports a large and interesting roster of NPCs. It begins with the Friendly Woman who starts tagging along with you on the underground before you even get to the tower. On the grounds you'll meet numerous historical ghosts, everyone from Guy Fawkes to Sir Walter Raleigh. There are a bunch of beefy guards and yeomen stationed about the place, some friendly and some hostile, and lots of amusing and poorly disguised thieves. The Japanese tourist attacks you with his camera, while the weapon of the American tourist is his sharp credit card, that of the French tourist his loaf of bread. Fictional celebrities "Dr Hoo" and "Professor Moriarity" show up as well, the spelling of their names presumably tweaked to avoid any copyright issues.
I appreciate the authors' feat of converting the layout of the real Tower of London tourist site into a satisfyingly arranged game map, something that is fun to explore, a little bit tricky and consistently interesting. The prose in this game is very clean and vivid by Eamon standards, and there's also humour in your adventurer negotiating mundane features of the modern world like the gift shop, or having to buy tickets to enter certain areas of the grounds. A sign declares that weapons are prohibited inside the tower, and the programming enforces this – at least in the moment in which you try to step through the front gate. This gesture is probably intended to stop you from bringing in any superweapons from your previous adventures, and will cause you to instead arm yourself with something found on the grounds which is balanced for the toughness of the local monsters. I gave in to the sign's demand on my first play, but was later pleased to discover that there is a way to get around the sign built into the game. That's a pretty neat piece of design.
There's not much custom programming in this Eamon and there are no in-game payoffs for your play style vis-a-vis stealing the crown jewels or protecting them, but the recreation of the tower and the various characters encountered on its grounds are charming, and the humour of time travel and anachronisms is well used. The game may also be of historical value through what I suspect is its fairly accurate recording of the state of the Tower of London as a tourist destination in 1983.