Reviews

From the ashes of the Imagine "mega-game" Bandersnatch, Denton Designs managed to salvage their work and fashion it into a game that was finally releasable.

There's much that's good; an intelligent control system allows you to walk, fly, pick up objects and fight using a single button joystick for control. The graphics are beautifully rendered with great animation for your character and evoke the atmosphere of Greek classics effectively.

However, the game is somewhat sparse; most of the time you're running around an empty maze and on the rare occasion that you come across a monster, combat isn't exactly earth shatteringly exciting either. There's also a highly illogical layout to the map that stops you from laying it out simply in 2D; I guess this was necessary in order to stop the game from being a simple plod.

This was a bit of mixed bag to start with but Denton Designs would soon go on to impress us with games such as Shadowfire, Frankie and The Great Escape where their reputation is much deserved.

Gift from the Gods was one of the first games I ever played and owned .

My grandparents gave it to me as a birthday present back in 1984 so my memories about this game are both special and emotive .

Nevertheless I never fell in love with the game for some reason or another.

All I can say about Gift from the Gods is that it is a good-looking game that doesn´t really live up to its premise.

Gift from the God is a rather average game with the looks of a great one.

At the first glance, this game looks like it's going to be great.
Then, after a while, you realize that you don't really understand anything in here, don't know what to do, and it quickly starts to get boring.

But there's a third phase as well, if you give it enough time and effort: when you start to comprehend your goal and ways to achieve it. Then it becomes quite interesting and entertaining.

It's partially because the mechanisms of the game are quite hard to comprehend.
For example, you cannot really slay any monster, but with one slash, you can immobilize it, and, if done immediately afterwards, with a stab you can make it disappear along with all other monsters (and other "illusions" around) for a short time.
And another confusing aspect of the game is that it also features a really tricky maze, one of the most interesting one I have ever seen on Spectrum. The rooms` vertical connections are completely independent from the horizontal connections, which not only makes it almost impossible to orientate in, but also makes it very hard to even somehow write down / paint.
For example, while going four rooms right and then back four rooms left returns you into the initial room (and the same applies for the UP and DOWN directions), going UP - RIGHT - DOWN - LEFT leaves you in a completely different room, which could easily be very far away, if you used a different route!
Therefore, there can be quite a huge number of possible routes between any two rooms.

As a result, you could theoretically probably get very quickly from any room to any room on the map, but you probably won't be able to, because you'll be unable to find the shortest route. Maybe a specialized routing program would be useful here. Anyone for the challenge? :-)

by Denton Designs [John Gibson, Karen Davies, Steve Crane]

A pioneering arcade/adventure, a big improvement on Alchemist, released just one year earlier, aesthetically exquisite, with well drawn, well animated and detailed graphics, some characters, and a more complex story. Although the gameplay is very slow-paced and a bit hollow. You wander a lot through empty rooms, and a map is necessary if you want to conclude something. Eventually you'll find some monsters, or your flyng sister Electra, or your evil mother shaped like a small cloud of small stars, or big spiders lowering from the ceiling, relieving drops of energetic water, the occasional message from your homies Apollo and Zeus, and lots and lots of Euclidian geometry. It's a relatively sophisticated effort, a joy for the eye, a gratification to erudite players with a weakness for greek mythology [not me, then], just a little boring. Oh, but what a style.
4/5

This feels unfinished to me. Mostly empty rooms and very little to actually do. I find it hard to believe, this was how the game was originally designed.