Village of Lost Souls

Village of Lost Souls is an excellent and rather creepy puzzlefest set in the once sleepy village of Dinham. You play as a fairly important monk named Nathan who has been summoned to commence an investigation into the Council Of Twelve; they are believed to be attempting to open a portal into the forbidden Thirteenth Realm which would bring disorder and chaos. A bit like the Labour Party winning a General Election here in the U.K.

Robico Software, one of the best of the many commercial text adventure software houses that proliferated in the mid-eighties, took a game from another excellent software house called Magus and extensively rewrote and expanded it using their own excellent programming language Amulet, which was both tough to decompile and very good at compressing text; something like 59% compression was achieved and this allows for a very large (220 odd locations) and detailed game to be written and played within the confines of the BBC, Electron and Amstrad.

The opening section of the game (the world map is very open right from the start) involves wandering around and taking in the depressing, almost Lovecraftian desolation of the once sleepy little village. Bloodied corpses and smashed, burned-out buildings stud the landscape and are likely to make you miss an important timed puzzle at the opening of the proceedings. This is the kind of old school game that expects you to learn from making mistakes and having to restart. There are a number of hidden items that require careful searching of every nook and cranny in the game. Map making is a prerequisite in a game of this size and complexity.

The multi word parser is one of the best of its time. While not up to the very finest it allows for "take all," "og" for retracing your steps once and the marvellous and almost unique "examine all" which is a real godsend and will scan every one of the objects, both takeable and non-takeable in your location and in your inventory all in one solitary parser output. Luxury indeed. "Help" will give you a long list of some of the verbs the game understands but there are a lot more that you have to glean for yourself.

I can only remember one spelling mistake which gives you some idea of the attention to detail that has gone into the game. Nearly everything can be examined and there are over seventy items that you will have to carry around or wear at one time or another; there are only a couple of poissons d'avril.

The writing by Martin Moore and Glen McCauley is just as masterly as the parser and the descriptions are both long, compelling and often sinister. The all-pervading feeling of a great darkness working its evil across the land is built up extremely cleverly without lapsing too far into splattergun hysteria. This is M.R. James rather than Sean S. Cunningham and far more effective as a result.

To counterbalance the air of almost tangible evil there is a very dry sense of humour with a fair number of puns thrown in, sometimes even when you've just died. I don't think the cruelty level is quite ratcheted up to eleven on the text adventure synthesizer but it is very easy to miss the importance of a timed puzzle at the beginning and consequently to miss learning a vital part of the plot; suffice to say when you smell smoke follow your nose.

The parser as mentioned is very good at holding your hand and despite its size the more far flung reaches of the map are traversable fairly quickly due to the clever layout of the game. Unusually there are almost no dark areas so no need to worry about conserving a lamp timer and no need to constantly eat or drink. To start with there don't appear to be many puzzles as the game is designed to give you a rather macabre "tour of duty" as you wander around and soak up the desolation and death all around you. There are, apart from the previously mentioned puzzle at the beginning, two other early repetitive problems involving animals; one revolves around a pack of dogs and the other a Raffles-like bird and solving them both quickly makes your life a lot easier; indeed the mangy mongrel can really screw you up so save often. Oh for some Strychnine-laced Winalot but you'll have to make do with something else you find on your travels to get rid of him. The puzzles become more numerous and more difficult as you progress through the game and there is one delightful mechanical chaining puzzle which would sit comfortably alongside a Jonathan Partington or Peter Killworth masterpiece. There is another less satisfactory problem which involves an abuse of the laws of physics while also using a dreadful Star Wars pun as a clue. The pun is a "key" element here.

The exciting denouement of the game involves snowdrifts, demons and a certain mirror and the puzzles come think and fast. Save often. Alomost everything about this game oozes quality; indeed I would recommend any Robico title if you have access to a BBC, Amstrad or Electron simulator. This game was originally to be the first part of the Realm Of Chaos trilogy and indeed the putative second part Communion was well nigh completed and ready for publishing when the company sadly foundered on the late eighties "graphical adventures" iceberg.

In summation this is big, user-friendly and packed with puzzles and humour; all overarched by a very strong back story.