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Review
Had a go with this one through an online Spectrum emulator. Unfortunately it is very frustrating to play, with almost every choice you make leading to instant death.
For example, just entering an obvious doorway a few rooms in leads to death, with no clue that anything untoward awaits you, even though previous danger had been well telegraphed with noises.
Commands must be made very specifically, with no margin for error. When I typed a command incorrectly while following the walkthrough out of frustration, the game still advanced time, leading to... instakill.
The atmosphere was intriguing, but the limitations of the parser are very obvious. I'll try this again religiously following the walkthrough, and see if this may be worth translating into a modern system like Inform 7.
Comments on this review
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From what I remember, having played and completed it back in the day, it's more forgiving once you get out of the initial section.
Being a PAWed game, it's fairly easy to look at the complete source code, although I'm not sure porting to Inform would add much. These games play perfectly fine as they are, once you get yourself into a suitable verb-noun mindset.
Like Simon's other games, this probably started life as a Quilled or PAWed Amstrad CPC adventure... although that version is currently lost.
Thanks, will try again soon. I got a bit further into (Spoiler - click to show) the maze but couldn't get past the snail.
