I played all the early Gilsoft adventures along time back, & recently discovered this one which I knew nothing about, with the only mention at the time seems to have been in an introduction in one of Derek Brewster’s Crash columns. With time on my hand I decided to look at it, & although very dated as most text adventures of this time are, it did at least hold my interest for a while.
Unlike most of the adventures of this period, this one concentrates mainly on its atmosphere & story, which it does with descriptive locations & pages of script detailing a story at different parts of the adventure, which is more like a simple modern Interactive Fiction game. It is very similar to the author’s earlier game Africa Gardens,though I thought that was poor due to its lack of any help & unfriendly parser. Although there are puzzles throughout, they are not numerous & in most cases easily solved, with probably the most difficult near the end, which is how it should be. To help you with any problems, the game has a nice help system, with clues within, which I thought was nice.
The introduction starts with you in a travelling fair, where you encounter a fortuneteller, who through his crystal ball, points to another world & transports you there. The locations are your basic fantasy type ones full of forests, valleys, wastelands etc, moving on to a Egyptian Sarcophagus where you discover your main quest, in how an Egyptian noble was murdered by a jealous priest, who sets a curse on his soul so he wanders forever & not enter the afterlife, & the game goes on in this vein.
As well as the good help system & story & descriptions, the other pluses are sensible puzzles, relevant vocabulary, no dead ends, & any deaths that I could see (though there is one animal lovers amongst us might not approve of). Unlike many early Quill games there is also no object limit that you can carry, & in a nice touch all the unnecessary items are conveniently disposed of at times in the adventure. There is a weird maze near the end of the game, but this is based around what is in the differing descriptions & not needed to be mapped to progress.
If you are looking for a Level 9 type game or a game of depth & quality this is not really for you, but if you have a little time on your hands to waste, you could do worse than this, & could even play with the walkthrough if you want to save time. Why it wasn’t better known I am not sure, as it doesn’t have a lot of the faults the early Quill games had, & is interesting if nothing else.
