Sphinx Adventure

It is said by relevant equine historians that all racehorses can be traced back to three original 'foundation' stallions; early text adventures have an even more gin-clear ancestry; ADVENT and Zork. This game's author, Paul Fellows stumbled upon the former at college and produced a game with a brick building at the start, axe throwing dwarfs and even a Hall Of The Mountain King. Like Willie Crowther he never produced another game but one was enough to cause many a furrowed brow in the bedrooms of the first BBC Microcomputer users back in the early eighties. Just collect twenty-one treasures and take them to the Sphinx somewhere in the desert to err....well, the result and reason is never really made clear. Never let it be said that plot overshadowed puzzle in those far-off days. Just do it will you?

It is scarcely a jaw-dropping revelation that you will face a meagre two word parser, several mazes, nasty creatures who will confront you with terrors even greater than tickets to the latest Milli Vanilli concert and an inventory limit. Aside from the few al fresco locations at the start, the game is played under perpetual darkness, although your light source is everlasting if you know how. So no endless treks for pools of oil, vending machines or calcium carbide crystals at least. I'm not sure that Mr. Crowther would approve though. 800 points and a subsequent over-sensitivity to bright light will prove your man or womanhood should you end triumphant.

The parser is somewhat thin gruel and the memory constrictions of the day forced the descriptions to be somewhat terse and lacking in much frippery. Electron players had it even worse. Nothing which isn't vital to the story can be referred to (the mirror image of Chekhov's Gun) which of course can be a help at narrowing down possible puzzle keys in some instances. No room for flabby descriptions means no room for atmosphere at such a restricting level. Surrealism runs riot however as giant bunnies exist next to bank vaults and a gardener's store abuts a hall of spirits. You get the general idea.

Another sacred tradition from those days was inherent unfairness. As usual you can screw up practically everywhere. One visit only areas only become recognisable as such after you have left them without doing everything that you should have and of course there are several "drop items to map them" mazes studded throughout the landscape. The final interminable maze may have you quitting through sheer exhaustion. Not since Peter O'Toole rode his blue eyes through a seemingly endless David Lean desert in Lawrence Of Arabia has one man or woman suffered on the sand so much as the player nearing the end of this. Director, cut. You can add the mystifying lack of a saved game facility (see Haunt and Russell Wallace's Cave Adventure) to the list of player vexations. In a work of this size and difficulty having to restart over and over again is inexcusable and must have put many people off back in the pre-emulator days. At least there are no daemons and a strangely generous inventory limit.

Most of the puzzles were hackneyed as far back as 1982. The Jonah puzzle is very similar to the one in Peter Killworth's Brand X from 1979, as is the mouse puzzle. A magic word is overused (it appears to be an ACME universal magic word) and some puzzles can be solved simply by holding the right object in the right place, always an unsatisfactory method by my reckoning. In summation the game is as much neuralgia as nostalgia and seemingly bug (if not Bugs) free although an older tape based version used to crash on the second traversal past the goblins in the Hall Of The Mountain King. See the Stardot forum for more information.