|
The
adventure is Quilled -- this utility has had an impact
on adventure almost as big as Dungeons and Dragons
did. As you may expect, Crystal Frog has fast
response times, a fair number of locations, a reasonable
vocabulary and verb/noun type input.
From
the first, each location is well described with nice
attention to detail, so you are told how the sun is
shining, what the trees look like and so on. I always
think that descriptions play one of the most important
roles in an adventure, and these conjure up quite vivid
images of the lands through which you are travelling.
Upon
my travels I soon discovered some quite unusual objects,
a gas mask, for example, and a spade (what is that for,
one wonders). I also stumbled upon a rather odd scarecrow,
very lifelike with spindly arms and legs. It was here
too that the adventure dropped some points in my book.
Firstly I tried EXAMining it and was promptly
told that I couldn't. Why not? The scarecrow was the
most interesting object that I'd come across and I was
determined to learn more about it. I tried going towards
it using all the available directions, SEARching
it, and just about everything my experience had
to offer, but to no avail. The scarecrow stood happily
unexamined and I stomped off to the next location rather
annoyed. This is a common weakness of Quilled adventures
(and not only Quilled ones either), that they fail to
offer a comprehensive EXAMINE facility. It can
be done with The Quill, although it isn't instantly
obvious, as I recollect from my cautious dabblings --
and one Quilled adventure from about this time last
year, the Spectrum Tower of Despair by Games
Workshop, had an extremely powerful EXAMINE.
To be fair, you can examine objects in Crystal Frog,
and that underlines another point about the examine
facility; once an explorer starts to do it, he wants
to keep on and gets frustrated when something that may
merely be adding to the general atmosphere, like the
scarecrow perhaps, cannot be looked at in more detail.
But I digress . . .
Soon
I found a cave and promptly entered, and from the description
found it to be comfortable, dry with a nice leaf bed
-- a veritable home from home! Also present was a fur
coat that I greedily took simply by GETting --
doing so was a slight mistake, I should have EXAMined
it first, for it in fact turned out to be a big
bear that promptly attacked me. The rest I'll leave
to your imagination, but it wasn't very nice. There
are quite a few of these unexpected hazards throughout
the adventure and I found myself with a head split in
two on more than one occasion!
The
game is an enjoyable one, although the vocabulary, reasonable
in itself, is rather limited in the respect that you
can't do much outside the set game. There are not a
lot of objects, but enough to get you puzzling over
their function, and some very nice touches, like the
apple -- I won't tell you what it does, but it comes
as a pleasant surprise.
Overall
this is quite a good little game, and one which is well
worth its very low price.
|
