Adventure 200

CJ Coombs Adventure 200 can hold its head high amongst its peers; most of them will have had much more memory to utilise and develop a coherent story even if all that underpins them is "explore a strange land and collect the king's missing treasures."

The 220 odd locations in here seem well connected and believable, and the author manages to wring a fair amount of atmosphere out of the necessarily short room descriptions.

The game is very easy to soft lock as certain objects, once picked up can not be put down again. As there is a fair amount of sneaking past guards involved it is often necessary to leave a tempting item where it is until you stumble upon a scenario where you might need it.

There are some beautiful set piece puzzles contained herein; one involving entering a firedamp filled mine and having to both find a way to start a machine that clears the gas then later turning it on again to thwart a pursuer is worthy of the Phoenix mainframe boys at Cambridge.

Choreographing the correct order in which to tackle the rather difficult puzzles is half the fun here.

The game is stuffed with mazes both great and small. You could argue there are eight although only one is very large. Dropping objects to map them works very well.

Mercifully there is no lamp timer or inventory limit which is refreshing to see in a game from 1982.

Oddly DESCRIBE works to glean more information about an item rather than EXAMINE.

All in all I would thoroughly recommend this tricky but fun treasure hunt. I also came across zero misspellings and grammatical mistakes.